SSD or Solid State Drives (or Disks) are the new kind of hard drives that are based on semi-conductor flash memory. These memories are non-volatile and hence the content will be intact even if power is removed.
The same technology is used in USB memory sticks. When you plug-in to your computer, this memory stick gets power and data can be read / written. Once, you un-plug it, power is removed and the data will be still present on the device.
The difference between SSD and USB memory sticks would be in the efficiency of the memory and the data transfer bandwidth available.
SSD Advantages
The majority of advantages in SSDs are because of the lack of moving parts compared to regular magnetic hard disk drives.
-SSDs are silent
Regular hard drives have high-speed moving parts and that often create noise in notebooks and desktops. By using SSD, you are free from such noises.
-SSDs are highly power efficient
An SSD use semiconductor circuits for storing data, where the power requirement is considerably lower than the mechanical magnetic hard disk drives. This feature is a boon for notebooks and mobile platform devices where the energy efficiency is of prime importance.
-High Performance & Reliability
Regular hard disks use reading heads; which in turn requires movement to appropriate cluster location. This results in some latency. In SSD, the data retrieval is almost instantaneous by addressing the memory location directly. Hence, the data in SSDs can be quickly loaded than in HDDs.
Lack of moving parts also reduces wear & tear and almost completely removes the heating problems. This means you data is safer than on a regular HDD.
SSD Disadvantages
-Expensive
Currently, the demand for SSD devices are limited and only few laptops are about to start using it. Once the demand increases, the prices will come down. Industry experts estimates that only by 2009, SSDs become affordable for common use.
-Slow Random Writes
Because of limitation of technology behind SSD, the random writing procedure is slower than that of regular hard disks. This means, SSD may not be suitable where random data writing is absolute necessity. (For example in Industrial, Chemical research requirements)
-Limited Writing Life Span
Current SSD technology has another limitation in erase/write cycles. These SSD become read-only once that limit is reached. However, researches are going on to improve the life span of SSDs. Thus, by the time, SSD becomes cheap and popular they would have better erase/write life span that is comparable with regular HDDs.
Conclusion
SSDs are the next big thing in disk storage. Being Solid-State and light, SSDs are the appropriate memory technology for all computing needs. Once the storage companies start mass-producing SSDs, we can see some huge price drops in SSD drives of larger capacity.
[...] advantages of SSDs are that they are fast, take less power, have no moving parts and are very [...]