How do those compare to, say, liquid-state drives?

Let’s start as we mean to go on: There is no such thing as liquid-state  drives; except maybe in terminator movies. By “solid-state” I mean built from solid semiconductor material with no moving parts, rather than the normal types of hard-drive in use today that read magnetic data via a read/write head attached to a seek arm from a series of spinning platters.

Solid-state drives were first introduced to the public as recently as 2007 at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. A solid state drive, or SSD, is the upcoming phase of computer hard drive technology and utilises the same kind of hardware-structure as USB flash drives use, made entirely of semiconductors; NAND Flash technology. The solid state drive uses almost 50% less energy than its regular equivalent, makes no noise, and is generally more stable. They could very well eventually replace the normal spinning-platter hard-drives when they are a lot less pricey and can store more data.

Whilst there are advantages to using a solid state drive with no moving parts; price, as already stated, is a factor currently preventing the SSD from taking over the hard drive market for laptop and desktop computers. Also involved in preventing this is a matter of storage capacity:

Some vendors offer 32 GB Solid State Drives for part of a small fortune. Solid state drives currently max out at 256GB; these drives are extremely highly expensive and beyond the budgetary reach of most geeks.

Having no moving parts means that SSDs are not affected by data corruption or operation failures caused by debris or movement. They are also largely unaffected by dust or by being dropped. Dropping a typical hard-drive can cause the heads to crash into the magnetic film on the platters; thus damaging certain sectors and rendering them unusable: if they have data already written to those sectors then that data becomes rendered unrecoverable.

Another advantage is that they can access data stored within them much faster, almost immediately, even if that data is fragmented. Added to this, the SSD has a longer lifespan than traditional HDDs, due once again to its having no moving parts: The expected lifespan is currently up to around 80% greater for SSDs. I’ve heard that some makers of solid state drives are claiming life expectancy of over 100 years; though I’m unsure how valid this claim is. Not many people, at today’s average lifespan, are going to live to find out.

No doubt, in time as the price comes down and the storage capacity begins to approach that of traditional hard-drives, the solid state hard drive will eventually replace traditional hard drives that consumers have been using for years. Currently, though, due to their lower price, manufacturers are sticking with the traditional spinning-platter hard-drives in the main for at least the time being.

Does your computer have a solid state hard drive? Do you find it faster? Please comment.