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Basically, solid state drives aren’t new but they made a huge splash in 2007 at the Consumer Electronic Show held in Las Vegas. They were heralded as the solution to many problems facing those of us who love portable computing. Solid State devices have been in use for commercial and military application a lot longer but te sheer enormous cost of this technology has kept it far out of the reach of all but the wealthiest of personal computer owners.

Basically these devices are types of hard drives which do not rely on magnetic media for their memory storage. Instead, they use semiconductors much like flash memory drives already do. In fact, both of these storage devices use similar non-volatile memory chips. However, the main difference between the two is that the solid state drive is not used as an external memory storage system like flash drives. They are built to be installed internally in place of a traditional hard drive.

If you’re wondering why using SSD’s would be a good idea, there are several advantages being promoted by industry insiders. This is where most of the promises come into the picture. Basically, these drives are considered great inventions because they are believed to deliver three amazing benefits: reduced power usage, faster access to memory, and improved reliability. All of these benefits are a result of the differences in the way solid state drives and traditional hard drives work.

Most of us have at least a basic understanding of how our hard drives work. Inside them are spinning magnetic platters where everything we do on our computers is saved. To work though, they rely on drive motors to move them. If anything happens to those motors or to the drive heads, then our hard drive ceases to function correctly and we’ll end up shopping for a new laptop or desktop.

These alternative drives don’t have all of those extra parts. Everything is done through Flash memory chips and most of us know that the portable Flash memory we use in our cameras and other storage devices does a pretty good job of saving quickly and of working when we need it to.

Evidence has shown that these drives do wonderful when you’re reading average size files. You’ll be able to access them quickly. However, if you’re working with large files or trying to save large files, you won’t see those fast speeds.

Do consider however that these drives are still in their infancy in terms of this type of use so that doesn’t mean these problems won’t be corrected down the line and we are already seeing a significant improvement.

Another huge promise is improved battery life for laptops because of the reduced power requirements. For one, this promise could never really deliver because the hard drive isn’t what uses up most of your laptop’s battery in the first place. Generally, you’re only talking about a 5% improvement in battery life and that’s not much of a bargain considering how much these drives add to the price of a laptop.

Finally, we can look at reliability. Since the drives haven’t been available that long, we really need more time to evaluate this claim. However, we do know that unlike traditional hard drives which can be written on indefinitely. Solid state drives can only be rewritten about 100,000 times – that may sound like a lot but it’s not.

To find out more about solid state drives on the computer repair Uk blog or our main Pc repair website