The era of SSD is coming

In October 2010, the industry giants including Intel, IBM, Dell, Fujitsu announce at the same time, set up “Solid State Disk Form Factor Working Group”. The first “Promotion Level Members” including Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, IBM and Intel, “Contribution Level Members” are Amphenol, Emulex, Fusion-io, IDT, Marvel Semiconductor, Micro, Molex, PLX, Qlogic, STEC, SandForce and Smart Modular Technology. After this group is established, it will promote the PCI-E hickey solid state disk to be standardized. So, does it mean the solid state disk will replace the traditional machinery hard disk to be the mainstream of data storage medium? With this doubt, let’s see the differences between solid state disk and traditional hard disk.       

Solid hard disk abandons the traditional magnetic medium, and employs the technology to store and read data through electronic storage medium. Since it breaks through the performance bottleneck of traditional machinery hard disk, it has very high storage performance. The revolutionary designs of solid state hard disk, like the integrated circuits-based and non-mechanical moving parts, meet the data read stability requirement in mobile work environment.

Firstly, Solid state hard disk doesn’t need mechanical structure, and it is totally semiconductor-based. It has no data searching time, lag time and disk seek time, so the data access speed is fast. Its data access ability is beyond 100M/s, and the current highest value can reach 300M/s.

Secondly, solid state disk use flash memory chips, so it is durable and shockproof. Even it accidentally collide with hard thing, the data loss possibility can be decreased to least.

Thirdly, since it has no mechanical parts, and FLASH flash memory chip, the solid state disk doesn’t have any noise.

Fourthly, the weight is light. Solid state disk is 20-30 gram lighter than common 1.8 inch hard disk, which make it possible that mobile devices carry multiple solid state disks. Simultaneously, because it is totally semiconductor-based and has no structure limit, it can be designed as various kinds of special electronic hard disk with different hickeys and shapes.   

At the same time, compared with traditional hard disk, solid state disk also has disadvantages:

Firstly, the manufacturing cost is far beyond mechanical hard disk. For laptop manufacturers, after choosing solid state disk as optional accessory, the upgrading fees will be far beyond actual cost. And this reason also causes hundreds of dollars price spread between laptop with traditional hard disk and laptop with solid state disk.

Secondly, the current machinery storage capacity can reach several TB, but the largest solid state disk compatibility can only reach hundreds of GB. 

Then we compare Windows’ supportive level to hard disk: computer industry has spent tens of years to optimize the traditional machinery hard disk, and the technology has been mature. Solid state disk just starts in computer industry, so some aspects may be not mature. However, Microsoft has stepped towards optimizing solid state hard disk, and its new released operating system Windows 7 is improved in the technology of solid state disk performance and life. System can automatically recognize the storage device is mechanical hard disk or solid state disk without any settings. If it is solid state disk, the system will close disk management function to avoid solid state disk constantly repeat read-write work. By this way, it decrease the of solid state disk chip loss. Besides, Trim command can effectively prevent solid state disk speed decreasing after long-time use, and prolong the flash memory use life. Now, many software and hardware manufacturer has started development work for solid state disk, for example, Intel, Seagate and others successively start to develop solid state disk which supports Tim commend. And the data recovery software, like MiniTool Power Data Recovery has developed data recovery module for solid state disk.             

From the contrast, we can know that solid disk has great advantage in performance, but it is limited by cost and storage capacity; although traditional machinery hard disk is supported by more perfect system software, the system software manufacturer also make great efforts to improve the support to solid state disk. We can predict that although the traditional machinery hard disk’s market position is not threatened at present, with the technology developing, solid state disk will replace the position of machinery hard disk after cost and storage problems are solved.