With the little keychain sized portable storage "sticks" often exceeding 1GB now, I knew it was only a matter of time before we would have some large storage viable for everyday use. Solid State Drives are like those little storage sticks, but in larger sizes, and with some advancements to lower the fault rate and increase the usable life.

SSD storage has no moving parts. It's very similar to RAM except it is non-volatile storage -- it retains what it stores even when powered off. Since there is no spinning disk involved, it uses less power and generates less heat - both helping extend battery life when used in notebook PCs.

Even more exciting, to me at least, is the speed improvement. A spinning disk takes some time to get up to speed upon start; it also has "heads" that move around when seeking out specific data. Without moving parts the SSD storage is way faster. I haven't done testing myself, but I have read that SSD is about 100 times faster to read from than spinning disk storage. I've also read that the seek time (time to locate the file being requested) can be as low as .12ms compared to 19ms on spinning drives (that's quite a difference!). I've read claims that Vista boots 30% faster on these new SSD devices.

Some other benefits are: No moving parts means that bumping a running system will not cause a storage fault like can happen on spinning drives; No magnetic media means better security - data erased is 100% gone (isn't always the case with spinning drives); No noise; Better reliability (since no moving parts and less to fail).

Probably the main downside is that the storage space is limited. I believe 32GB is the largest SSD device available right now. I'm personally okay with that for a notebook. Cost is also a factor, but negligible in my opinion.

Dell now has SSD in certain laptops - like their D420. With CPUs so fast now, my experience has shown disk access to be more of a bottleneck than CPU. If your experience is the same, then SSD is certainly worth looking at as an option.

I'm looking forward to the day soon when we can get servers and SANs loaded with SSD. The speed of these systems will be incredible compared to even the fastest spinning SCSI and fiber drives. With disk IO often a bottleneck on database servers, SSD is going to really help scalability of IO intensive applications.

~Brad

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