We’re not talking about scary monsters or potentially fatal contagious diseases here, we’re talking about computers! And SSD is your friend, in more ways than you can ever imagine! You’ll be forgiven if you’re not completely familiar with the term, as it has entered the modern lexicon fairly recently. It stands for solid-state drive, and it is the latest technological improvement to our tried and trusted computers. We seem to have had a long love and hate relationship with our computers and laptops, appreciating their virtues when they help us get work done, and cursing them when they don’t function as quickly as we’d like, or possibly not at all. One of the biggest challenges for computer manufacturers has been the internal hard drive, that repository of all our files, pictures, videos and other images which are near and dear to us. As everyone who has used a computer for some time knows, the hard drive is potentially the Achilles’ heel of the entire computer. Although it can perform reliably most of the time, it is quite delicate, and subject to becoming damaged if the computer or laptop is bumped or potentially dropped by mistake. If this happens, the traditional magnetic hard drive, which is made up of many individual plates, similar to a stack of plates in a busy restaurant, can fail completely. Often, one can lose all the data that they had carefully stored over years on their trusted companion. There are times when experts can actually recover some or all of the data from a broken hard drive, but this is truly a hit or miss situation, and no one wants to go through the exercise to find out if their data is in fact recoverable. Many people, cognizant of this potential issue, tend to back up all of their computer data to an external hard drive, which they keep safely tucked away, out of harm’s way, with the ability to restore all their precious data if the situation arises.
The future is here for us to enjoy
Solid-state drives are beyond a doubt the wave of the future, and are available to us now. Scientists have worked for decades to bring these modern devices to market, but had overcome several challenges along the way:
- The first major challenge was to create an electronic device that would retain any information that was stored on it after power was turned off. As most people know, the memory that operates any modern computer doesn’t have this feature, so that when the computer is powered down, all the processing instructions are wiped out
- Once the problem of memory retention was solved, there was the need to make the solid-state drives’ connections to modern computers standard with existing magnetic disk memories, so that one could be swapped out for tone another
- Cost was a major concern for a long time. The devices were extremely expensive to build, and were priced out of reach of most consumers. With modern manufacturing technologies, and the ability to produce these drives in volume, prices have become equal to old-fashioned magnetic drives
- Another challenge was to make these devices small enough, while allowing them to store as much information as their older magnetic drive cousins
Finally, the future is here for us to enjoy. Solid state drives (SSD) are no more expensive than regular magnetic drives, and offer several advantages, such as resistance to any bumps or shocks, less power consumption, and utmost reliability. So don’t hesitate, make the decision today to replace your old magnetic drive with one of these new, futuristic solid-state drives!