Solid State Drives (SSD)

Solid State Drives (SSD) are straight substitutes for the hard disks or standard disk drives in your personal computer. In addition many SSD drives can also be connected to any of these computers as an external drive for extra storage using a USB port. Solid state drives use microchips to store information in more stable memory chips and have no moving parts. Below are some reasons why a solid state drive is better then standard hard drives.  The new SSD drives still tend to be a bit more expensive than a standard hard disk.

SSD simply offer improved durability and performance.  With increasing demand of SSD drives, more and more entrepreneurs have entered this business. Gone are the days, when 256 GB SSD was considered as a high speed SSD. Manufacturers have now come up with modern designs of SSD drives. These are the SSD drives that can be plugged into the existing USB ports on your computer systems. Depending upon the model you choose, there are flash drives with varied storage capacities ranging from 256 GB SSD to 16 GB drives and even more.

Before buying a SSD drive, you should first analyze your requirements in terms of storage capacity such as whether 512 GB SSD drive is enough for you or you want a higher or lower capacity. A Solid State Drive is a more durable replacement for the standard hard disk drives currently found in most of our personal computers. These new SSD drives can work with virtually any notebook, netbook, desktop or laptop computer. The biggest difference between a solid state Drive and a standard hard disk is that hard disks have multiple, and often fragile, moving parts that work together to store and retrieve your computer's data. This makes these hard drives a lot more susceptible to many types of serious damage, which can easily happen if your computer is knocked or jolted hard enough, while its' hard disk drive is being operated by your computer. The SSD Drive on the other hand does not have any moving parts. The new SSD drives, also due to their lack of moving parts, will operate easily without a cooling fan, and this means that any computer which runs with just solid state drives (and no hard disks) will much quieter and almost silent when compared to existing computers running a hard disk drive.

Unfortunately hard disk drives use a spinning platter, which stores your computer data, and a mechanism to read and write this data as required. A SSD drive is built entirely from memory chips and a controller to perform the read/write functions to retrieve and store your computer data. At some point in the near future solid state drives could replace all current hard disk drives. This means that solid state drives are faster than conventional hard drives and this speed increase can be very impressive especially on smaller portable computers.

While current costs per Gigabyte for SSD's approach $2 per GB, traditional drives are approaching $0.05 per GB. Disk intensive tasks like loading programs and operating systems are where SSD's truly shine. The SSD's specialty lies with accessing multiple files at once. Upgrading to a solid state drive makes the overall system feel more responsive when compared to a mechanical hard drive.