Fall 08 - T33 - G2

Topic
Solid State Hard Drives

Issue
Are Solid State Drives (SSD) better than conventional magnetic Hard Disk Drives (HDD)?

Group Members
Ali, Goldie  Irons, Scott  Leitch, Kevin  Titcomb, Justin

Introduction
In the span of fifty years Computers have developed a long way. From ENIAC, the 63 m² behemoth to laptops smaller than a bread box, Computers have shown arguably the highest rate of technological growth than any other consumer product.

As much as computers have grown on the whole, there are industries dedicated to the advancing of individual parts. In the news, we often hear about the next fastest processor, or the next smallest computer chip, or the next biggest monitor.

We pose the question: Where are Hard Drives going? Hard drives are possibly the most important, yet damageable component of a computer. They have grown exponentially in capacity, but there is always room for more, more, more. As solid state drives surface on the market, they offer a trade off of capacity for speed and durability.

By looking at the history of Hard Disk Drives, early uses and the development of Solid State Drives, the advantages and disadvantages of Solid State Drives, and the future of Hard Drives, this article will demonstrate that Solid State Hard Drives are the future of computing.

History of Hard Disk Drives
The hard disk drive (HDD) was invented by an IBM team led by Rey Johnson on September 13, 1956. They are commonly referred to as a hard disk or hard drive. HDD's are non-volatile storage devices (a computer memory that can retain the stored information even when not powered) which stores digitally encoded data on rapidly rotating platters with magnetic surfaces. Originally HDD's were developed strictly for computers, but now are also used in mobile phones, digital video recorders, digital audio players, personal digital assistants, digital cameras and video game consoles. The HDD plays a very important role in overall system performance, probably more than most people recognize. The speed at which the PC boots up and programs load is directly related to hard disk speed (most ranging from 5,400-10,000 rpm's). The hard disk's performance is also critical when multitasking is being used or when processing large amounts of data such as graphics work, editing sound and video, or working with databases.

Since the first HDD, incredible advances in its technology have made the HDD one of if not the most important part of the computer. Some of the first HDD's would now be considered as having an extremely small storage capacity of a mere 10 MB (unit of information equal to 1,048,576 bytes), whereas more recent HDD's can have a storage capacity of up to 1.5 TB (unit of information equal to 1,099,511,627,776 bytes). HDD dimensions range from the original 8" or 5.25" to the more popular 3.5" (used in desktops) and 2.5" (used in laptops) and even further down to the 0.85" (used in mobile phones). Cost of the HDD has also changed drastically over the past 40 years. In 1956 the price for HDD's was ridiculously high at an incredible $10,000 USD per MB, but now you can get approximately 9 MB for a single penny.

Early Uses and Development
Solid state drives are non-volatile memory devices that can permanently store data and consist of no moving parts. Solid State drives are used in usb memory sticks, a memory card from a digital camera. For the most part, this technology in its early life was used for embedded systems in military applications, or in high performance computer research labs.

Brief timeline:

First real Solid State Drive (SSD) was developed by Dataram in the 1976, they called it the BULKCORE. This drive would be attached to minicomputers and each chassis held 8 x 256k x 18 RAM (Random Access Memory). Total capacity of 2 megabytes.

In 1978 a gigabyte of RAM for a SSD sold for approximately one million US dollars. An increased amount of research was put into development as Texas Memory Systems supplied 16 kilobyte RAM based SSD system to various oil companies for seismic data acquisition.

In 1983 Sharp PC-5000 introduced 128 kilobyte solid-state storage cartridges, containing bubble memory (uses a thin film of magnetic material to hold small magnetized areas known as bubbles, each storing one bit.

In February 2003 Competitors Texas Memory Systems and Imperial Technology announced the world's first terabyte class SSD systems.

On Feb. 26, 2008, Lenovo offered one of the first portable pc to incorporate solid state — the ThinkPad X300, which ships with a 64GB solid state drive for $2,799

Advantages and Disadvantages of Solid State Drives
Solid State Drives Versus Hard Drives:

Solid state drives(SSD) have been around for many years, only recently have consumers become more aware of this new and advancing technology.

Advantages:

A traditional drive has drive motors to spin up the magnetic platters and the drive heads, whereas the solid state drive does not have any moving parts which decreases impact damage, noise impact(no fan or spinning disks), it eliminates the risk of mechanical failure, as well as they have approximately six times the shock resistance ability to endure extreme shock, and 20% improvement in temperature range.

Storage for this drive is handled by flash memory chips. This makes for greater storage compared to regular notebooks which contains less than half capacity. The usage of these chips has distinct features, which improves the performance of the SSD. The first is that it has a higher reliability, which is a key factor for portable drives. Secondly it has fast data access, a feature which all consumers will enjoy. The drive doesn't have to spin up the drive platter or move drive heads therefore the data can be read from the drive near instantly. In a recent demo of two similar equipped notebook computers, Fujitsu was able to demonstrate a roughly 20% speed increase in the booting of Windows XP on a SSD over a standard hard drive. The most important role is that it has less power consumption when it comes to using portable computers. There is no power draw for the motors, so the drive uses less energy than the regular hard drive which in turn produces less heat.

Other factors that appeal to consumers are the instant sleep and wake modes, the higher durability rate, it has speed advantages over conventional hard disks.

Disadvantages:

There are two primary limiting factors of using the solid state drives in notebook and desktop computers is the cost per gigabyte and the capacity. The cost of the drives is roughly the same as the entire notebook they could be installed into. This is gradually changing as the number of companies producing the drives and the capacity for producing the flash memory chips grows. The other problem affecting the adoption of the solid state drives is capacity. Traditional notebook hard drives typically offer capacities of between 100 GB and 250GB for a tenth of the price of a much lower-capacity SSD. Currently the capacity of SSD’s is far lower than that of conventional hard drives. The traditional hard drive capacity also continues to expand, and hard drives are likely to maintain their capacity edge for some time.

The Future of Solid State Drives
By: Kevin Leitch

Computer technology is an area that advances quickly. Much more rapidly than many other fields, and improvements made are often unfathomable to the key thinkers in the area. Bill Gates, arguably the major pioneer of the information age, is often attributed with a statement made in 1981 that “640 k ought to be enough [memory] for anyone”1. While he now denies that he ever said it,the fact remains that people on the bleeding edge had trouble predicting the scope to which the computer industry would grow.

IBM co-founder Gordon Moore is hailed as the most accurate of techno-profits. Moore’s Law: "the number of transistors that can be fit onto a square inch of silicon doubles every 12 months"2, has held true for nearly fifty years. In fact, Moore won the 2008 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Medal of Honor for his prediction published in 1965.3 Using Moore’s Law as a basis, one can predict that the Solid State Drive industry is steadily on the rise, and that in the near future, SSDs will be cheaper, smaller, and have larger capacities.

Currently, standard laptop-sized Solid State hard drives are commonly found in 32, 64, and 128GB iterations. The price per gigabyte on average is between $2.00 and $4.00 to the consumer. While this is a significant drop in price from the 1978 1GB price tag of $1 000 000 US4, it is still a pretty penny in comparison to conventional hard drives’ $0.22 to $0.27 per gigabyte price tag.5 But technology prices come down as time goes on. For example, in 1981 a 6.3 MB conventional hard drive cost $2895 US.

With that in mind, it makes sense that the price-tag on the 1 TB SSD, was $2 million US. Companies continue to push the boundaries of capacity, as Violin Memory has built a 4 TB “memory appliance” and Sun Microsystems has launched a rack-mount NAS system that contains 44 TB, both using SSD technology. As the technology gets bigger in capacity and smaller in size, consumer possibilities increases exponentially. While massive SSDs are used exclusively at the industrial level right now, as better drives are developed, the consumer will start seeing the technology integrated into their every day devices. Cell phones, ipods, laptops, ebook readers, digital cameras, and other everyday technologies already employ solid state technology, and will continue to use each new upgrade of drive. Memory keys will gain capacity and people will be able to have billions of bytes of information on their keychains. The durability of Solid State drives makes them ideal for use with space projects, and NASA even has an exclusive Solid State provider.6 It seems solid state hard drives are already replacing conventional magnetic drives. Apple has started to move towards Solid State Drives not only in their iPods (being employed in the nano, shuffle, and touch models) but also now offers a solid state drive in their Macbook Air, or can be included in their new Macbook.7

Solid state drives seem to be the preferred choice when it comes to temperature, noise, speed, and durability. Let’s face it. Solid State Drives are taking over.

Conclusion
From the above information we have learned that solid state drives have come along way from their early stages in life. If we look at the hard drive one of the primary parts of the structure of a computer, it has yet to see a substantial change until now. Solid state drives require no moving parts, thus making them much more durable and faster as well.

We predict solid state drives to replace conventional drives within the next couple years. We have already seen a push from computer manufacturers, especially those who make laptop computers (Apple Inc., Lenovo) offer such drives and only see it to continue as prices prolong to fall.