The rising popularity of the solid state hard drive warrants a closer look at its benefits. The solid state drive, or the SSD, is indeed a breakthrough: it is a hard drive which uses flash memory. It does away with the cumbersome mechanical components of the HDD which are prone to failure, breakdown and shock. Hard drive platters are fragile and sensitive. Even a small impact can cause the drive to be completely unreadable.
In contrast, SSDs typically have flash memory microchips, with no moving parts. This translates to improved performance, less power usage, faster data access, better durability, no noise, less chance of losing data, and no heat output. Performance tests also show that the solid state hard drive is faster than HDDs due to its near-instantaneous access capacity.
As of the present, the advantages of the SSD are best suited to notebooks and laptops. This is due to the fact that unlike mobile computers, desktops’ hard drives are not prone to breakage (since they are not moved around), their CPUs have cooling fans, and batteries are not an issue.
The battery life of the solid state hard drive
Some tests show a negligible difference between the SSD battery life versus the HDD; it seems that hard drives do not have a sizable impact on battery life. A hard drive is responsible for only five to fifteen percent of a notebook’s overall power usage, although there are claims that the solid state hard drive battery life outlasts that of an HDD for at least 30 minutes.
The speed and durability of the solid state hard drive
The benefits of the solid state hard drive, however, that still need to be measured over a longer period of time, are its durability and the lower probability of drive failure and data loss. An SSD uses non-volatile NAND flash memory; it does not have any mechanical parts. It only moves electrons, not physical components. This results in faster data reading and writing. Searches and file transfer times are faster. Applications, routine maintenance tasks, virus scans, file-compilation times and most other tasks are faster as well. And SSDs are better than HDDs at multi-tasking. It is said that the fastest ssd hard drive to date is the OCZ Vertex 3 MAX IOPS Edition, with a top read and write speed of 550MB/s.
External hard drives
The external solid state hard drive has transfer speeds of up to ten times faster than its non-SSD equivalents. Again, with the external SSD hard drive, just like the internal SSD, there is lower power consumption, the user can work in rugged environments, and it can perform as fast as an internal hard drive.
In conclusion to this SSD hard drive review, a lot of the advantages of SSD depend on the particular consumer’s needs. If the computer is used for writing papers and surfing the ‘net, the SSD’s advantages are negligible. However, if there are a lot of video downloading and multi-tasking involved, an SSD is warranted for its better handling of drive-intensive tasks. As for the average user, what differences he will notice most in a solid state hard drive are the faster boot-up, faster return from standby mode, and quicker application launch times.
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ssd hard drive review
FlashSim: A Simulator for NAND Flash-based Solid-State Drives
