In news that won’t surprise anyone who’s heard of Moore’s Law, researchers concluded that solid-state Flash storage (SSD) drives will finally break into the mainstream next year.
You can buy Flash drives for your laptops right now, but they’re still more expensive that their old-tech, moving-parts hard disk counterparts. But not for much longer.
By 2012, the price for solid state drives should have dropped to $1 per gigabyte, pausing there only briefly before plunging lower still.
The consequences are nice to think about, but not much of a surprise. Computers will get even smaller and thinner than they are already, consuming less power and running much faster.
There aren’t many computers with built-in SSDs right now, certainly no cheap ones. As the costs come down, that will change.
And, like the floppy disk before it, we will soon bid the hard disk drive a fond farewell.
Or perhaps not so fond. Anyone who’s experienced the joys of a dead disk drive (i.e., pretty much everyone) will be glad to be rid of that ominous clicking sound and feeling of dread when a disk finally kicks the digital bucket.
That’s not to say that SSDs are completely reliable either. They can still break. Developer Jeff Atwood recently wrote a funny piece about his experience of SSDs, saying that he didn’t mind them failing often as long as they continued to make the rest of his computing life easier.
Which on the whole, they do. Everything is so much faster with an SSD – so much so, that Apple was able to use an older, cheaper processor in its last bunch of MacBook Airs, knowing that the speed bump from the SSD would more than make up for fewer gigahertz of processing grunt.
(Via PC World)