by Dan Dunkin

Created on: July 02, 2007   Last Updated: November 05, 2011

While Holographic disks may become a thing of the future, today they are limited in their development as a write once -read many type drives. In otherwords, the need for computers is the ability to overwrite existing data and replace it with updated data. The near future solution to faster drives may well become Solid State Hard Drives.

Solid State Hard Drives are hard drives that work in your computer just like the mechanical drives but they are made from memory chips instead of a spinning platter with little arms that have to ravel back and forth to find the next sector of data.

The technology of data storage could be an article in itself, but I'll only skim over it to give an overview of the advantages of the latest in Solid State technology. Hard Drives are the weakest link in the home computer chain. CPUs and memory chips are transferring data at speeds as high as 1,000,000,000 bits of information per second and more, your typical hard drives have a sustained output of about 17,000,000 bits of data per second. This is a major bottle neck in the need for data processing.

The pro's and cons of mechanical hard drives are, Pro - they are cheap and they are relatively long lasting and dependable. The Cons are they can deliver a sector of data rapidly, but then they have lag time as the arm moves across the platter in search of the next piece of data. The overall performance of most typical IDE type drives are even though they are rated for 133 Mb per second, on a burst they can do this, but in retrieving data their overall performance is about 17 Mb per second.

This is where Solid State Hard Drives come in. Since there are no mechanical components that have to physically move to find the next piece of data, the retrieval process is nearly constant. Most of the high end SSD's can sustain a constant through put of data at about 10 times the speed of a mechanical hard drive because the search for the next sector does not occur, they simply pull the data from whatever sector is needed.

Two years ago I called and spoke to a representative of one of the larger SSD manufacturers, and was flat out told that Solid State Hard Drives would never be seen in home computers because of the cost of the memory chips they require. The Technology at that point in time was primarily for big industry and military applications. I also remember when they said a pocket sized calculator would never happen also and a computer equivalent to an 8086 or less took up a full warehouse and

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>