Grayling Blog

Solid State Drives (or solid memory modules for storage) have started a market revolution. In the 1980’s and 1990’s, the drives were developed for computers that were exposed to high levels of vibrations, such as armoured vehicles and rescue service vehicles. More recently, they have been incorporated into laptops to replace conventional hard drives. The use of Flash memory instead of rotating magnetic discs for data storage purposes is the main reason for this shift.

SSD’s increase the speed of data access, use significantly less energy and generate minimal levels of heat. These factors go some way into explaining why they enjoy huge levels of support amongst an increasingly growing group of heavy users, who are looking for a way to boost their operating system.

However, server parks are still reluctant to use SSD’s as they have not been tested rigorously enough and currently cost four times the price of conventional hard disks, though this has not prevented Google from announcing that they will use SSD’s in some of their servers in an effort to reduce energy consumption.

The SSD market has been discovered by major memory and chip manufacturers such as Intel, Samsung and SanDisk. These brands are pushing to make SSD’s cheaper, faster and more reliable. That’s why many analysts are predicting that SSD’s will be the next big thing. I completely agree and would go so far as to say that this development will be more revolutionary than the switch from single core processing to multiple core processing in 2005.