Solid State Drive : Overview, Structure and Function of SSD

Solid State Drive is made with the help of solid state physics. Instead of moving mechanical parts such as spinning magnetic disks, it has no moving parts. To understand the basics of traditional Hard Disk Drive, please read our previous article on Hard Disk Drive.

Advantages of a solid state drive over conventional drives are mechanically robust, very short access time and the absence of noise due to absence of mechanical components. The main disadvantage of  solid state drive  compared to conventional hard drives of identical capacity is still a considerably higher price. Despite the mechanical robustness of a  solid state drive , it can also fail or cause system errors, an error usually happens due to the controller or in the firmware. In this article we will go in to more details of a Solid State Drive.

Overview, Structure and Function of a  solid state drive

Two types of memory chips are used in Solid State Drive; Flash -based and SDRAM based. The combination with DDR SDRAM provides more power to a Solid State Drive. Solid State Drive consists of flash and controller chips, which are arranged on a circuit board. Size has no influence on the speed, but the number of chips. Many Solid State Drive models have plastic or metal (partially) covered to protect the components as well – to give solidity. The highlights for the advantage of light weight Solid State Drive is  intransigence of the impact resistance of the metal casing back on.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Solid State Drive

The elimination of the sensitive and motor bearing mechanics of conventional drives with rotating disks has increased the impact resistance of Solid State Drive. The major disadvantage is price factor which we have said about at the beginning. At the time of writing this article, a Solid State Drive when compared with a traditional hard disk drive of same capacity is still about 14 times higher priced.