Looks like HDDs are going to change in the near future Samsung have brought out an "all flash" solid state drives for laptops which seem pretty quick although small capacity at the moment.
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The 64GB drive is faster than its predecessor too, with maximum read and write speeds of 64MBps and 45MBps, respectively - 4.3 and 6.4 times greater than a typical 80GB hard disk drive, Samsung claimed, and 1.2 and 1.5 times faster than its 32GB SSD.
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An SSD is commonly comprised of either NAND flash (non-volatile) or SDRAM (volatile).
SSDs based on volatile memory such as SDRAM are categorized by fast data access, less than 0.01 milliseconds (over 250 times faster than the fastest hard drives in 2004) and are used primarily to accelerate applications that would otherwise be held back by the latency of disk drives.
DRAM-based SSDs typically incorporate internal battery and backup disk systems to ensure data persistence. If power is lost for whatever reason, the battery would keep the unit powered long enough to copy all data from random access memory (RAM) to backup disk. Upon the restoration of power, data is copied back from backup disk to RAM and the SSD resumes normal operation.
However, most SSD manufacturers use nonvolatile flash memory to create more rugged and compact alternatives to DRAM-based SSDs. These flash memory-based SSDs, also known as flash drives, do not require batteries, allowing makers to replicate standard disk drive form factors (1.8-inch, 2.5-inch, and 3.5-inch). In addition, nonvolatility allows flash SSDs to retain memory even during sudden power outages, ensuring data retrievability. Just like DRAM SSDs, flash SSDs are extremely fast since these devices have no moving parts, eliminating seek time, latency and other electro-mechanical delays inherent in conventional disk drives. (Though flash SSDs are significantly slower than DRAM SSDs).
Solid state drives are especially useful on a computer which already has the maximum amount of RAM. For example, some x86 architectures have a 4 GB limit, but this can effectively be extended by putting the paging file or swap file on a SSD. These SSD do not provide as fast storage as main RAM because of the bandwidth bottleneck of the bus they connect to, but would still provide a performance increase over placing the swap file on a traditional hard disk drive.
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* Faster startup – Since no spin-up is required.
* Far faster than conventional disks on random I/O.
* Extremely low read and write latency (seek) times, roughly 5 orders of magnitude faster than the best current mechanical disks.
* Faster boot and application launch time when hard disk seeks are the limiting factor. See Amdahl's law.
* In some cases, somewhat longer lifetime – Flash storage typically has a data lifetime on the order of 10 years before degradation. If data is periodically refreshed, it can store data indefinitely. Flash drives have limited endurance (typically, 100,000–300,000 write cycles), which, if a single block is written once per second, leads to failure in a few days at most. However, all flash drives employ a technique known as wear levelling, where writes are smoothly distributed over all blocks. This means that if one write occurs per second, and n is the number of writes before failure and m is the number of blocks on the disk, failure no longer occurs in n seconds, but in (n*m) seconds. Given that blocks are typically on the order of 1kb and an 8 GB disk will have 8,388,608 blocks (8*1024*1024*1024 / 1024), assuming only 100,000 write cycles this gives about 26,600 years before failure; remember also this is with one write per second for that entire time. In consumer level devices you can expect the drives data storage component to last roughly 10 years in normal use.
http://www.samsungssd.com/ 