solid state drives

Remember the hybrid hard drive?

It’s basically a hard drive with an extra large cache and it was essentially a stop-gap between the hard drive and the SSD.

Back in 2007 both Seagate and Samsung were showing off these drives, and they made a lot of sense then — the drives would combine the speed of flash with the capacity of a mechanical disk.

What could go wrong?

The state of the mechanical disk is not strong. Solid-state drives might not be advancing at the rate that some people expected, but they continue to become more affordable, capacious, and speedy.

That doesn’t mean everyone is using them though — most SSDs at approachable prices are too small to be the main drive on a laptop or the boot drive on a desktop, and they remain a very expensive upgrade from manufacturers if you aren’t building your own computer.

Continuing its most excellent tradition of PC Buyers Guides (starting way back in 2004!) Guru3D has published its PC Buyers Guide for summer 2011.

Despite its name, it’s actually a guide on picking out the components for your next DIY computer — but even if you’re not a rig builder, it will still guide you towards buying the best or most up-to-date OEM computer from Best Buy or PC World.

Enterprise Storage Forum: "Flashed-based solid-state drives (SSDs) are becoming a big issue for enterprise storage users; a number of customers I work with are planning for this new "tier 0" data storage for a number of reasons.

It could be as simple as IOPS per watt, IOPS per dollar, or for some applications, bandwidth per GB/sec of storage."

Internetnews: "Seagate, the world's largest hard drive vendor, is expanding into new territories with the announcements of solid-state drives (SSDs) and a revamp of its mobility drive business to include the smallest drive yet.

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Enterprise IT Planet: "Solid state drives (SSDs) — also known as flash — are everywhere. In fact, they may even have done a great service to mankind by diverting messaging away from green IT.

The big server and storage OEMs seem to have gotten over their fixation with green IT, courtesy of their enthusiasm for SSD."

SSDs (Solid-State Drives) are a hot topic right now for a number of reasons; not the least of which being their power to performance ratio.

But to better understand SSDs you should first get a grip on how they are constructed and the features/limitations of these drives.

Intel has stopped shipping its X-18M and X-25M solid-state-disc (SSD) consumer drives after a bug was found that could render the SSD inoperable in some cases.

Enterprise Storage Forum: "RAID controllers designed for hard disks and IOPS aren't going to cut it in the new world of solid state drives (SSDs) and pNFS, which are capable of feeding so much more data into the channel that streaming bandwidth is going to become the problem for RAID vendors."