The Solid State Drive (or SSD), called wrongly Solid State Disk (no mechanical part or disc is however present), is a reader only made up of Mémoire flash contrary to the Hard drive (or HDD) which, him, is conceived with a mechanical system.

They have, on the traditional discs, of serious advantages: first of all their performances with an access time 0,1 ms old, their low electricity consumption (0,1 Watt in day before, 0,9 Watt in activity) and of course their silence of total operation. Their main objective is to impose itself like system storage. A role for which the current SSD are cut: the capacity is not paramount for this type of use, a modest size sufficient while their excellent access time is a very appreciable no-claims bonus. A traditional configuration would be thus, a small SSD for the Operating system coupled to one or more magnetic disks being useful, them, with storage.

This type of configuration is particularly adapted to a HTPC where the reader of storage could put himself in day before when no file is read and thus starting only at the time of an access. The noise at rest would be thus very close to zero since a HTPC ventilated carefully makes hear almost only its hard drive, largely covering the breath of the ventilators.

The principal criticism which one can hear on the SSD remains nevertheless their lifespan. Until recently, it remained very weak and constituted indeed a brake with its development. Nevertheless, of important progress were realized in this field. Samsung, for example, announced in November 2006 to have developed its technology MLC (Multi-Level Concealment) which makes it possible to distribute the data on the unit of the storage cells. This memory MLC is nevertheless lower than the SLC (Individual Level Concealment) more powerful in writing and reading.

But an important defect pollutes the file of the SSD, their quantities of storage still remain very weak for a modern computer. Existing capacities (8, 16,32,64 and 128 Go) being insufficient to occupy the station of principal storage unit. Only some rare exceptions (160 and 512 Go) can be allowed to covet this station. However their price remains, in general, far from gravitational. Indeed, the version 8 Go can reach 400$, and the 500 Go is about tens of thousands of dollars.

Since the beginning, the lifespan of a cell is of: 10,000 cycles of writings. Quantify which can seem rather important but that it is advisable to undervalue, data being stored on the same cells. Technology MLV would thus allow a substantial profit of longevity. The announced figures would be of approximately 30 years of MTBF for conditions however already delicate since calculated on the basis of constant flow of 1 Go per hour on the disc. These figures remain for the moment subjects to deposit.

The successor of the magnetic hard drive?

In the mobile and low-size equipment which is the gasoline of the new generation of diffuse data processing and the ambient Intelligence, more and more of experts consider that the relatively fragile magnetic hard drive and of an incompressible minimal size because of a mechanical system in rotation is not the optimal solution. It is the bet which with Samsung fact: that of Solid State Drive (SSD) which would replace the mechanics of hard drives (HDD) by Mémoire flash. The Korean manufacturer would like to take 20% of the market shares of storage since 2008 with this technology.

According to Samsung, the market of the memory chips flash in technology NAND of 8 and 16 Gbit will progress from 150% in 2006.

References

Source: IsraelValley.com