Digital Home Thoughts: Samsung 32GB Solid State Drive

"Going back some, the invention of the spinning metal disk and moving head was a huge innovation over old(er) school tapes, bringing down random access times and increasing density and life-spans. However, it’s already been 25 years since then so we're long overdue for another monumental storage change. The continual development of the aforementioned spinning disks has had to solider on, simply because there has been nothing else to challenge it for size, cost and reliability. During its existence the rampaging uptake of computers into just about everything, has in some respects left the humble hard drive behind: it can serve us just megabits per second rather than the gigas and teras we’re used to seeing from everything else in a PC. Its capacity and densities are ever increasing, but the performance is still the bottleneck of many systems. Did I say reliability? "



Despite solid state devices offering a greater reliability because of no moving parts, NAND Flash suffers from wear of use and actually loses the ability to record data after a certain number of writes. SSD producers have got around this by constantly varying where the bits are written to. Honestly, I am so tempted. But the whopping $600-$700 cost (it is unclear exactly what the cost is) is prohibitive. But the good news is that the prices are only going to keep going down.