What is an SSD?

Solid-State Drive is the topic for today folks. It is new in town and the stakes on it is rising as days go by. These drives are slowly replacing the old fashioned hard drives everywhere starting from households to servers and mainframes. Here's a brief of what an SSD is and what this beautiful piece or art can do for you.
            SSD is made of semiconductor chips. Have you ever heard of volatile and non-volatile memory? RAM is a volatile memory, meaning any data stored on it is lost if it loses power. A volatile memory is what we have on a flash drive. A similar mechanism is implemented here in SSD. There are no moving components such as a platter or a read-write head like a HDD has. These devices are a set of chips laid together. As there are no physical components like a HDD, it is insusceptible to power fluctuations or if the computer takes a strong hit. Whereas in the case of a HDD, there are bright chances that you will lose your data. Another major advantage with an SSD is its speed. Reading speeds can go up to 2.5 GB/s and write speeds, almost 1.5 GB/s. I'm talking about the fastest SSD that's in the market right now, Samsung 950 Pro which was built on an advanced V-NAND technology. Now comes the question, what is a NAND? NAND and NOR are two types of flash which differ by their architecture. NAND circuits are wired in a series while NOR is arranged in a parallel manner. NAND circuits thus are the cheapest and fastest way of transmitting signals. An SSD also has a SATA controller just like a HDD. This controller takes charge of the NAND chips and the communication involved to keep it going. SSD comes in 2.5 and 3.5 inches and looks a lot similar to a hard drive.

Now, coming to the real question. Why are SSDs so Expensive? What are the advantages of an SSD over HDD

1) First and the most obvious fact - the technology is new. You would not believe if I say a HDD cost 50,000 $ when it was first introduced. Any new technology or a device that comes in is at it's peak when introduced. SSDs are slowly getting cheaper and cheaper as more and more competition rises among the sellers.


2) It is superfast! An SSD can read data at speeds up to 2.5 GB/s and write data at 1.5 GB/s. I bet you can never make a HDD run so fast.


3) SSDs are safe and save power. All of you trying to save money from your electricity bill to buy yourself an Apple 6s, here's one way to cut down on your power consumption. An SSD is said to use between 1.5W to 2W at the maximum usage limit. That's a lot lesser when you compare it to a HDD that uses more than 6W.


4) SSDs are a lot quieter than the quietest HDD you can ever find. Since these devices do not have any moving objects in them (like a HDD does), there is no mechanical activity that's going on in there.


5) An SSD can take kicks and punches without any problem. That's right my friend! If you're used to dropping your laptop frequently or kicking that cabinet in anger, this is definitely for you! SSD is not susceptible to any kicks or thuds and thus there are fewer chances of you losing any data on it.


Still wondering why they're so expensive?