SSD’s slowly coming of age?
Seems the SSD (sold state drive) is slowly coming of age – the prices are dropping slowly… You can guarantee that over the next few years we’ll all wonder why the hell we had little spinny things called “hard drives”… Especially in something so fragile as a mobile computer!
What, with 16GB for just over £113, that’s still £ 7.11 per gig (approx 70x more than hard drives (12p) – and 2x the cheapest Flash memory (£ 3.50)), but it’s creeping ever cheaper.
It’ll will be interesting what mass take-up of SSD’s will bring to the PC market really – in theory there should be far less ‘data-loss’, apart from mistakes by users such as deleting files etc. The SSD’s just stop working after a certain amount of writes: your data is supposed to still be readable from the memory… So when the SSD ‘fails’ you just buy a new one, install your OS, and then plug the old one up so you can copy the old data over.
Plus the major obvious benefit with SSD’s is they don’t have a motor – so they save loads of power — perfect for laptops etc… And their properties also tend to fit into things like servers – Very Fast (no seek time), MB/sec through the roof and much lower long-term cost due to the lower power usage.
At this rate I’m predicting the end of the hard drive over the next few years!