Solid State Hard Drives

So why Solid State Hard Drives then?

As an electronic engineer I will use a computer a lot and it occurred to me that over my career the hours I spend on a computer will really start to add up. The amount of energy that I will use up in my lifetime simply by doing my job is phenomenal. So I thought, maybe there's a way to cut down on my power consumption whilst using the computer, and after doing a bit of research I stumbled upon a few solutions, but the one that caught my eye was Solid State drives as an alternative to standard moving parts hard drives.

Why exactly are Solid State Drives a good thing?

There are something like 100 Million working PCs in the world today. Understandably this means on a global scale PCs are using huge amounts of power. This also means that any cut down on PC power consumption would be a great thing, even if in individual PCs the cut down was only small, globally it would still be a massive saving of power. One way of doing this is to use Solid State Hard Drives instead of conventional Hard Drives as they use 50% less power than their counterparts and have some other nifty bonuses that I shall discuss in detail in a later piece of coursework. Also if you think about it, the percentage of power saved will increase in the future due to standard hard drives having to spin faster.

A standard Hard Drive Disk has a platter with magnetic surfaces that is continuously spinning at a very rapid speed. Over this platter is an arm with read-and -write heads on the end, hovering very close to the platter. This arm also moves so that it can use its heads on different tracks on the platter, reading and writing data where it's needed. Naturally all this constant movement uses up power, but there is an alternative that has no moving parts and so doesn't use nearly as much power, SSDs.

There are two types of SSDs, those comprised of NAND flash (non-volatile) and those comprised of SDRAM (volatile).

The DRAM based SSD are very fast at accessing data, less than 0.01 milliseconds (over 250 times faster than the fastest hard drives in 2004). But being volatile they need internal batteries and backup disks in case of a loss of power, to ensure data isn't lost. This may negate the extra power saved by not having moving parts, so I will be mainly focussing on the NAND flash SSDs.

The NAND flash SSDs are also extremely fast in comparison to standard drives (not nearly as fast as the DRAM SSDs though), but have the added bonus of being non-volatile and without the need for internal batteries and back up disks are much more compact than the DRAM SSDs. You will undoubtedly be well acquainted with flash drives ,as these NAND SSDs are also known, indeed almost everyone owns a flash pen these days, well its the same principle but on a larger scale.

Plan of inquiry

I plan to do most of my research using the internet but will attempt to track down any magazine or news articles on the subject. (E.g. electronics weekly)

One website I will be using is Wikipedia as it has articles on SSDs and on the alternatives.

I have also found a few forums that may help me in respect to calculating the save in power:
http://www.daniweb.com/forums/thread68367.html
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies-archive.cfm/535127.html

This website has been helpful with facts (from a consumer’s point of view):
http://news.digitaltrends.com/news/story/12453/sandisk_launches_32_gb_solid-state_drive

Also www.pcworld.com has been helpful in supplying data and most of all showing the advantages of SDDs over alternatives.
I plan to search the web sites of other electronics and computer suppliers for information as well. (E.g. maplin, rapid, dell etc.)
Also I will be visiting the websites of Hard drive manufactures (e.g. Fujitsu, Samsung, IBM) to gather general information but also specific information on any differences between different manufactures products.