Solid State Disk (SSD)

A solid state disk (SSD) - is electrically, mechanically and software compatible with a conventional (magnetic) hard disk.

The difference is that the storage medium is not magnetic (like a hard disk) or optical (like a CD) but solid state semiconductor such as battery backed RAM, EPROM or other electrically erasable RAMlike chip such as flash.

This provides faster access time than a hard disk, because the SSD data can be randomly accessed in the same time whatever the storage location. The SSD access time does not depend on a read/write interface head synchronising with a data sector on a rotating disk. The SSD also provides greater physical resilience to physical vibration, shock and extreme temperature fluctuations. The only downside is a higher cost per megabyte of storage - although in some applications the higher reliability of SSDs makes them cheaper to own than replacing multiple failing hard disks. Also in enterprise server acceleration applications - the benefit of the SSD is that it reduces the number of servers needed compared to using hard disk based RAID on its own.

Historically RAM based SSDs were faster than flash based products - but in recent years the performance of the fastest flash SSDs has been more than fast enough to replace RAM based systems in many server acceleration applications.

Both types of SSDs are available in a wide range of form factors and supporting traditional disk interfaces. A complete list of manufacturers with tables by form factor, technology type and interface type is updated in real-time in the Solid State Disks Buyers Guide

News about SSDs and a simple directory can be seen on STORAGEsearch.com's main SSD page.

This definition by STORAGEsearch.com was first published in 2000