As I spend more and more time in hotel rooms I find my laptop often wakes me up at night due to the various applications that are set to run after hours. There is the disk defragmenter, the anti-spyware program, the virus scanner, etc. it is a wonder I get any sleep at all with all my computer is doing right next to my head in most hotel rooms.
Sure I can turn the computer off but then I am a day behind in my protection from hackers, viruses and worms.
Obviously I am looking forward to faster and quieter hard drives such as this one from Samsung based on SSD which stands for solid-state disk technology. The storage device features immediately accessible, static NAND flash memory rather than the rotating discs usually used in hard drives
What’s more, SSD weighs only half as much as a hard drive. Samsung claims that the gadget reads data three times faster and writes data 1.5 times quicker. Not only that, but SSD consumes only five percent of the electricity required to power a hard disk drive. The device operates silently since it doesn’t have any motor or other noise-generating components.
Analysts are of the view that laptops equipped with SSD will comprise 30 percent of the global laptop market by 2008. They have high hopes for SSD-equipped laptops, predicting that the price of a 32-gigabyte SSD will go down from the $500 to $200.
Media reports say that the global SSD market will expand from $540 million in 2006 to $4.5 billion dollars by 2010.
My take is that these drives will be the future for laptop-based storage. As long as prices keep coming down that is. The one possible monkey wrench in the future of SSD is the potential for our storage needs to increase. For example storing digital photos takes up more space as the resolution of digital cameras increases.
The same thing goes for video as storing TV programs and movies will become more commonplace. So the challenge for SSD will be to get the prices down per gigabyte as low or lower than hard disks.
If that happens the need for hard disks becomes questionable.
