The original usage of the term solid-state (from solid-state physics) refers to the use of semiconductor devices rather than electron tubes, but in this context, has been adopted to distinguish solid-state electronics from electromechanical devices as well. With no moving parts, solid-state drives are less fragile than hard disks and are also silent (unless a cooling fan is used); as there are no mechanical delays, they usually employ low access time and latency.
Welcome to CWAnswers
CWAnswers is your guide to the sprawling world wide web. The directory aims to provide a useful guide made by users. You can share your knowledge as well - simply sign up and edit your first entry. For questions just contact the team at support - at - cwanswers.com.
Weblinks for Flash Drive
Top 10 for Flash Drive
Things about Flash Drive you find nowhere else.
Select content modules
The original usage of the term solid-state (from solid-state physics) refers to the use of semiconductor devices rather than electron tubes, but in this context, has been adopted to distinguish solid-state electronics from electromechanical devices as well. With no moving parts, solid-state drives are less fragile than hard disks and are also silent (unless a cooling fan is used); as there are no mechanical delays, they usually employ low access time and latency.
SSDs have begun to appear in laptops, although as of 2009 they are substantially more expensive per unit of capacity than hard drives (US$580 for a 256 GB SSD, vs. US$50 for a similar size external USB HDD).
History
The first ferrite memory SSD devices, or auxiliary memory units as they were called at the time, emerged during the era of vacuum tube computers.Fact: date=August 2008 But with the introduction of cheaper drum storage units, their use was discontinued. Later, in the 1970s and 1980s, SSDs were implemented in semiconductor memory for early supercomputers of IBM, Amdahl and Cray; however, the prohibitively high price of the built-to-order SSDs made them quite seldom used.
In 1978 StorageTek developed the first modern type of solid-state drive. In the mid-1980s Santa Clara Systems introduced BatRam, an array of 1 megabit DIP RAM Chips and a custom controller card that emulated a hard disk. The package included a rechargeable battery to preserve the memory chip contents when the array was not powered. The Sharp PC-5000, introduced in 1983, used 128 kilobyte (128 KB) solid-state storage cartridges, containing bubble memory.
RAM "disks" were popular as boot media in the 1980s when hard drives were expensive, floppy drives were slow, and a few systems, such as the Amiga series, the Apple IIgs, and later the Macintosh Portable, supported such booting. Tandy MS-DOS machines were equipped with DOS and DeskMate in ROM, as well. At the cost of some main memory, the system could be soft-rebooted and be back in the operating system in mere seconds instead of minutes. Some systems were battery-backed so contents could persist when the system was shut down.
In 1995 M-Systems introduced flash-based solid-state drives. (SanDisk acquired M-Systems in November 2006). Since then, SSDs have been used successfully as hard disk drive replacements by the military and aerospace industries, as well as other mission-critical applications. These applications require the exceptional mean time between failures (MTBF) rates that solid-state drives achieve, by virtue of their ability to withstand extreme shock, vibration and temperature ranges.
