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SSD, short for Solid State Disks (or Solid State Drives). They are considered to be the future of computing, answering the questions that have been around for years. In all aspects, SSDs appear to be better, but are they? I've been playing about with some for a while, and I've been surprised.

Idea : SSDs use less power

This is one of the major beliefs, but it isn't necessarily true. Some tests have been around on the 'net for some time, and while it may no longer be true, at the beginning of the SSD hype era, some of them actually used more power than a mechanical drive. The ones I've been playing about with use less energy than mechanical drives, and especially they don't have spin-up times where a motor is using an awful amount of power, at least as far as netbooks are concerned.

Idea : SSDs are faster

Yes and no. A mechanical drive takes a "long" time to retrieve data; first the heads must be positioned onto the correct sector, then the head must "wait" for the platter to spin round to the correct place for the data to be read. These operations are calculated in milliseconds, and in the lower part of the scale. Hard drives have evolved at an incredible rate over the last few years, and someone even compared hard drive operation to flying a passenger jet a few meters above the ground. Whilst mechanical drive performance has increased ten fold over the last few years, they just can't compare to SSDs that read data almost instantaneously. I need the data at this place, and the drive just gets it in a single operation.No head moving, no platter spin, nothing. It's just a RAM access. SSDs are blisteringly fast... for reads. Now, what most people don't say, is that life isn't just about reading, there i, of course, the write part. The drives that I've been using are terribly slow, and are much slower than their mechanical counterparts. I'm having a hard tome with our drives, since I need to change the system accordingly.

Idea : SSDs burn out because they can only read/write data a limited amount of times

True, and false. SSDs do suffer from write failures, but are designed so that writes will be placed evenly over the entire memory space. Secondly, enormous progress has been made in the memory chip field, and more and more writes can be made. A lot of tests have been made, and using constant writes where a 64Gb drive is entirely written over every day, it would take over 7 years to burn out the drive, which is about the life expectancy of a mechanical drive anyway.

Idea : SSDs are far more robust.

 Absolutely true. With no moving parts, an SSD can survive enormous wear and tear. The drives I am playing with are simply 4 chips soldered onto a board. We chose SSD drives for our machines especially for this; users can subject the netbooks to huge stresses and not be concerned about their data. An SSD can survive far more than the system it is in; the screen and mainboard will die well before the SSD, which can survive stress beyond the 350G barrier.

In my honest opinion, SSDs are not the answer to all of mankind's problems, they are a choice of technology.  They have their strong points, they have their weak points, and an engineer's job is to decide which type of drive is most fit for a particular job. I needed a system that could survive wear and tear, and SSDs were a perfect fit.