A solid state drive is a modern form of hard drive which rather than using spinning disks as in traditional hard drives uses flash memory to store it’s data. Solid state drives have only recently become affordable and are in a number of popular laptops such as the ASUS EPC and the Mac Air. There are two types of SSD, Single Level Cell SSDs and Multi Level Cell SSDs.
Since there are no moving parts in solid state drives they have a number of advantages over disc based drives.
They have faster start up and read speeds, lower seek times, lower power consumption, they are also lighter and more reliability. They aren’t without their disadvantages though, they are a lot more expensive per GB than traditional hard drives, they have limited write cycles and lower write speeds, and although they are lighter per GB they actually take up more space.
So far the most determining factors in the use of
Solid state drives
has been their lightweight, their low power consumption and their physical robustness. Ultra mobile laptops with SSDs weigh less than 1kg and can hold over 20GB of data, this is a quarter of the weight of typical laptops and is making them popular with people who regularly carry their laptop.
The robustness and low power consumption of solid state drives has led to them being used in the one laptop per child (OLPC) initiative. For these laptops low power consumption is imperative because in the African countries where they’re used electricity supplies are unreliable. Also, the environment they’re used in is somewhat harsher than western environments, making robustness important.
The two types of SSD, Single Level Cell and Multi Level Cell, differ in the number of bits they have per cell. SLC SSDs have only one bit per cell whereas MLC SSDs have three or more bits per cell. MLC SSDs have their advantages in that they can hold more memory and will therefore be cheaper per GB, however due to their higher sophistication they are generally slower, have less read write cycles and are less reliable.
Currently most laptops use Single level cell technology, the Mac Air for instance, however with improvements being made in MLC technology to address its weaknesses it is thought that MLC SSDs will become the SSDs of choice for most manufacturers as their cost per GB will inevitable be lower. However, for people willing to pay more for a better performing drive there will certainly be a niche market for high spec SLC SSDs.
Solid State Drives are currently in their infancy, but are likely to become the hard drive of choice for most laptops in the future with SLC technology being used in some of the high end notebooks, they are unlikely to be used in Desktop PCs as their lightness and robustness are a less important consideration for these types of PC.
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