Solid-State+Drives

A solid state drive is a storage device for data that uses a solid-state memory that can store information. A solid state drive acts as a hard drive interface, and easily replaces what it can do in most computer applications. An SSD uses RAM. The original way the term solid-state was used referred to the use of semiconductor devices as well. With not many moving parts, solid-sate drive are less fragile than other hard disks and are silent. There are no delays mechanically and a solid-state drive usually employs access time and low latency.



"The first ferrite memory SSD devices, or auxiliary memory units as they were called at the time, emerged during the era of vacuum tube computers.[// [|citation needed] //] But with the introduction of cheaper [|drum storage units], their use was discontinued. Later, in the 1970s and 1980s, SSDs were implemented in semiconductor memory for early supercomputers of IBM, Amdahl and Cray; [|[4]] however, the prohibitively high price of the built-to-order SSDs made them quite seldom used. In 1978 [|StorageTek] developed the first modern type of solid-state drive. In the mid-1980s Santa Clara Systems introduced BatRam, an array of 1 megabit [|DIP] RAM Chips and a custom controller card that emulated a hard disk. The package included a rechargeable battery to preserve the memory chip contents when the array was not powered. The [|Sharp PC-5000], introduced in 1983, used 128 kilobyte (128 [|KB] ) solid-state storage cartridges, containing [|bubble memory]. [|RAM "disks"] were popular as boot media in the 1980s when hard drives were expensive, floppy drives were slow, and a few systems, such as the [|Amiga] series, the [|Apple IIgs], and later the [|Macintosh Portable] , supported such booting. Tandy MS-DOS machines were equipped with DOS and DeskMate in ROM, as well. At the cost of some main memory, the system could be soft-rebooted and be back in the operating system in mere seconds instead of minutes. Some systems were [|battery] -backed so contents could persist when the system was shut down. In 1995 [|M-Systems] introduced flash-based solid-state drives. ( [|SanDisk] acquired M-Systems in November 2006). Since then, SSDs have been used successfully as hard disk drive replacements by the military and aerospace industries, as well as other mission-critical applications. These applications require the exceptional [|mean time between failures] (MTBF) rates that solid-state drives achieve, by virtue of their ability to withstand extreme shock, vibration and temperature ranges."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive

STANDARD HDD VS. SOLID-STATE DRIVE []