Of all the things that most affect the performance of a PC, one of the (if not THE) biggest bottleneck is the hard drive. It is one of the few mechanical items left in your computer. Yes, there is the optical drive (CD/DVD), but this does not impact performance of the PC unless you are actually using it. Every bit of data that is being crunched by the operating system needs to be read from or written to the hard drive. So, the fact that that piece of equipment is still mechanical in nature is a bottleneck.

If you look at the rest of the PC, it operates by electronics only. Electrons move very quickly. The traditional hard drive consists of a series of discs, called platters, which store data. A read/write head moves across the surface of the platters to read and write data. In simpler terms, it’s mechanical. And that means slow (at least compared to non-mechanical parts).

Solid State Drives

The trend is that PCs are likely to move toward the use of solid state drives (SSDs). A solid state drive is a drive that uses non-volatile memory to store data. It allows data to be stored and accessed without any moving parts, very similar to how a USB flash drive works. By getting rid of these moving parts, a solid state drive gets rid of issues like seek time, latency, and even hard drive failures. After all, hard drives are capable of failing because they have moving, mechanical parts. Get rid of the mechanical parts and you no longer have a drive that can crash.

There are differing types of solid state drives. One kind is based on SDRAM, which is volatile memory. Volatile memory simply means that the memory will maintain it’s data only so long as power is supplied to the memory. As soon as the power is cut off, everything is lost. The RAM in your computer uses this technology. SSDs based on this technology have the same speed benefits of normal PC memory, which is roughly 200X or faster than today’s hard drives. The kicker is that you have to maintain a battery in the unit to keep power moving to the volatile memory. For this reason, this type of SSD is only going to be used for certain applications, and probably not inside the standard PC. At least not for standard data storage.

Then you have the Flash-based drives, which use non-volatile memory. This means that they will retain the data even when power is suddenly removed. These kinds of drives are still MUCH faster than the standard hard drive, but they are not as fast as those drives which use volatile memory.

So, How Good Are These?

Good. A flash-based drive has a lot of advantages:

• Fast start-up, since you don’t have to wait for the disc platters to spin up
• Much faster access time
• Much faster boot times and application load times
• Longer life span. While drive crashes are not a risk, the memory itself does have a life span. It is said that a typical flash drive will have about a 10-year life span. Technically, the technology in use in today’s hard drives has a long life span (the actual data), however, because of the mechanical nature of the drives, actual life span is much less.
• No mechanical parts means less power, less heat, and NO NOISE.
• Speed consistency. Normal hard drives usually slow down as they fill up, whereas flash drives can maintain constant speed even if at peak capacity.

One of the drawbacks is that data is not recoverable. If a hard drive crashes, the data is usually still on the disc platters. This means that a technician with the proper equipment can usually take the drive apart and recover the data from the disc. With flash drives, this is not possible.

And, of course, today we have major drawbacks of price and capacity. These types of drives are not yet commonplace. The ones that are out there are relatively small compared to normal hard drives. And you pay through the nose for them, too. I would expect, though, that as the technology gets better, we will see larger capacities for less money, just as we got during the perfection of the hard drive.

Today’s Options

Since this technology is rather new, what is out there is used typically by a select audience who pays a lot of money for the privilege. Right now, most SSDs in use are in ultra-portables, notebooks and tablet PCs. The technology has been used in cell phones for longer than that, at reduced capacities.

Manufacturers active in development of this technology include Sandisk, Samsung, A-DATA, and some other lesser known companies. Capacities range from about 32 GB to up to 160 GB. The sweet spot right now seems to be around 64 GB. The 160 GB drive was released by Adtron in February 2007 (view the press release ). Seagate just announced they will begin manufacturing flash drives in 2008.

Conclusion

Are flash drives likely to totally take over the market any time soon? Probably not. In-Stat predicts that SSDs will be shipped for about 23.8 million PCs by 2011. This is only about 6% of the total market. That’s a huge growth, considering hardly anybody is using it right now. But, 6% of the market is not a total takeover.

Even so, SSDs do represent the future of the hard drive. Or better stated, a replacement for the hard drive.

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