Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
able laptop PCs from Dell, Asus, Lenovo, and others in 2007-2008. Since then many oth-
er laptop and desktop PC manufacturers have introduced systems with flash-based SSDs.
Ever since SSDs first became available for PCs in the early 1980s, many have thought
that they would universally replace hard drives. Well, it has been nearly 30 years since I
first heard that prediction, and it still hasn't come true. Flash-based SSDs have one main
attribute that prevents them from replacing magnetic storage for mainstream markets or
applications: cost. Relative to modern hard disk drives, SSDs are much more expensive.
Performance has also been a problem. Early SSDs were slower than HDDs, especially
when writing data, and performance would often fall dramatically as the drive filled up.
Upuntil recently they have also been significantly lower in capacity than HDDs.With the
recentimprovements inbothspeedandcapacity,SSDsarefinallybecomingviablealtern-
atives to hard drives for applications where cost is not as important as performance and
durability. Virtually all modern SSDs use the SATA (Serial ATA) interface to connect to
the PC and appear just like a standard hard disk to the system. Both 2.5-inch and 1.8-inch
SSDsareshownin
Figure10.1
.Somehigh-performance SSDscomeinacard-basedform
factor, usually designed for PCI Express slots.
Figure 10.1
2.5-inch and 1.8-inch Intel SSDs.
