Solid state drives based on Flash memory

Hard disk-based computer storage drives have been around for 50 years now and few desktop or laptop PCs can do without them. Now an upstart technology has appeared — SSDs or solid state drives based on Flash memory, the stuff that goes into those handy thumb drives that plug into the Universal Serial Bus socket.Flash has a very fast access time — and without moving parts, is more rugged that hard disk drives. But till now maximum storage capacity has been a fraction of what a hard drive offers. USB Flash drives come in tens of gigabytes; hard drives have crossed a peta byte (that’s a million gigabytes).

The biggest player in the hard drive business — the U.S.-based Seagate — has seen the writing on the wall, storage-wise. Visiting India last week, Ban Seng Teh, Seagate’s vice-president and marketing director for Asia-Pacific Sales and Marketing,said: Not pure hard drives; not pure solid-state flash devices — but a canny masala mix of the two technologies.

This is how it will work: Increasingly laptop and portable PC makers will go for systems where the bulk storage of the hard disk (which is typically around 200 GB today) will be complemented by a built-in solid state device of a few hundred megabytes to a few GBs. This will act as a ‘cache,’ storing the most frequently required information and reducing the number of times the hard drive has to start and stop.

Seagate has just launched one such drive, the Momentus 5400 PSD, with 80,120 or 160 GBs on the hard disk and 256 MB of Flash. The systems are a third costlier than pure hard drives of comparable capacity — but consume just half the power and respond much faster, especially when working with Windows Vista, an operating system that has been written to exploit just such a device.

Samsung too has launched similar 2-in-1 drives — so go hybrid storage-wise in 2008.

ps: hmmm…!