While the name Solid State Drives might make you think of some road construction project, it’s hardly something you could drive your car through.

Solid State Drives (SSD), or Solid State Memory, refers to a competing technology to your Hard Disk Drive (HDD). You know that square metal object in your computer that spins, makes a lot of noise and stores all your pirated music, movies and the three word documents you did for class last week? Well that’s your Hard Disk Drive.

A HDD is composed of a specific amount of rotating magnetic platters covered in microscopic rust particles and corresponding heads per each side of the platters.

Using magnetic heads that resemble a record player’s needle, the drive ‘reads’ the placement of the magnetic material. It is then converted into digital ones and zeros that represent your media and information stored on the drive in its lowest form.

Of course this is a simplistic view of how an HDD works, but I won’t bore you with techno mumbo jumbo – yet. Most importantly, just note that there are a lot of moving parts in an HDD.

Solid State Drives work much like your USB flash drives do: They are both memory chips on a circuit board that replace the spinning platters and heads that a HDD has. Unlike flash USB memory, SSD drives mimic an HDDs interface, making them interchangeable with HDDs where standard flash can not.

This introduces a variety of advantages to the SSD interface. For example, due to the lack of moving parts, an SSD is basically silent unless there is a cooling fan in place. They also have a much faster start up when booting an operating system on them due to a lack of platter ‘spin-up,’ and they have extremely fast read and write speeds because there is no physical head to move.

The lack of moving parts is what puts SSDs over HDDs for issues like mechanical reliability, read/write time and noise output. However, there are still quite a few kinks to work out in the technology.

Typically, lower capacity SSDs will require less power to operate, and they generate less heat. With newer higher capacity, SSDs’, power consumption and heat output can be the same, if not more, then standard HDDs.

Since high capacity SSDs are way behind the capacity of large HDDs (256GB vs. 1.5TB respectively), there is little use for the smaller SSDs. So anyone looking for a break on their electric bill might want to wait a bit longer for technology to advance.

Probably the biggest problems with SSD’s are, like all new technologies, they are very expensive. Even if you think your pocket is deep enough, you might want to read this part carefully.

For your average HDD, 1 gigabyte (1GB) of storage costs about $0.15, as opposed to $2 to $3.50 per gigabyte of storage on an SSD drive. To put that in perspective a little father for those who are going, ‘Oh, that’s not too bad,’ a 256GB SSD costs anywhere from $400 to $600, where a similar sized 250GB HDD will run you around a measly $60.

If you still feel you can afford this, by all means, go for it. It’s a fantastic technology and has defiantly set the way for new storage mediums. Besides, in a few years the cost for SSDs will probably have dropped so low you won’t even think twice about buying one. Until then, I think I’ll stick to my good old fashioned pen and paper to store my word documents.

Matthew Bellezza is a senior information management and technology major. His column appears every other week in The Daily Orange. He can be reached at mlbellez@syr.edu

Published on October 6, 2008 at 12:00 pm