The latest issue of Fast Company features an article that takes a look at the state of solid state and the promise that our electronic gadgets will soon no longer need hard drives. As the primary point of failure for most computer-based devices, I’m eagerly looking forward to the day when hard drives are no longer necessary, but I thought we still had a few years before this could start happening. But according to Have a Solid Holiday, things are progressing faster than I realized in the world of solid state memory.

I knew that these so-called solid state drives (SSD) were faster and require less power to run than typical hard drives, but I didn’t realize how dramatic the differences are. According to this Fast Company article, SSDs can access a piece of data in 200 millionths of a second, compared to the 8 thousandths of a second a hard drive takes, and they do this using 10 times less power than traditional hard drives need.

I was also impressed with the speed that SSDs are finding their way into new devices. You can now not only buy solid-state based laptops, but also digital video cameras, phones, and it appears that most electronic devices that use hard drives either already have SSD-based alternatives or very soon will.

Look Inside >> December 2008/January 2009

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