Remember the floppy diskette? How many of you still own one today, much less use one? It is said that hard drives are going in the same general direction, to a dusty corner and IT collectors.
Storing solutions today are much faster and more reliable (at least until power runs out) than the plain old hard drive, ATA 33 or SATA 300. Solid state disks, as they are called, have still a prohibiting price and a smaller general capacity than their larger brothers, but they are growing fast and it seems that prices are somewhat declining.

One of the advantages of hard drives is the huge storing capacity achieved in the last few years and of course a modest price. Even a 750GB drive can be purchased for only a couple of hundred dollars. The problem with hard drives is that they are slow, thousand of times slower than a modern day CPU and several hundred times slower than the system memory. So they are a huge performance bottleneck. A number of technologies tried to solve at least part of this problem, by implementing a new interface (SATA), higher revolving speeds (from 5400 to 10000 and above), increased cache size (from 2MB to 8, 16 or even 32MB). Unfortunately, there are limits to current hard drive technology and maybe the manufacturers just hit them. Other problems are the power needed, heat generation and the very fact that a hard drives has many, many sensible moving parts, so it is vulnerable to shocks.

Solid state disks, on the other hand, seem to be the perfect complement for a hard drive. They have no moving parts, by their very own nature and according to Wade Tuma, CEO of Solid Data Systems, as cited by the site Processor, "DRAM drives are low latency, which dramatically improves application throughput per server." SSDs are roughly 500 times faster than a typical hard drive when performing a random search. Because of existing file systems (designed for hard drives) SSDs have slower write speeds, so Cheen Liao, president of Synology said that "file systems are needed to adapt to SSDs".

According to Shattuck, "Western Digital does not believe that the significant hard drive capacity-per-cost advantage over SSDs will change dramatically over the next few years, especially with mainstream hard drive form factors, including 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch." He also adds that hard drive densities are growing at solid rates (at least 40% per year), and high-capacity storage is in greater demand than ever before with new applications such as video, music, and photography.

According to Solid Data Systems' Tuma, solid-state disks and hard drives will both continue to get cheaper, so pricing is not likely to even out. But, he adds, price per byte should not be the metric used to compare SSDs to HDDs because SSDs are already cheaper when measured in terms of price per transaction. "SDRAM-based disks", says Tuma, "are the best way to increase transaction performance and to prevent server overload during peak periods. So, they are a lifesaver in high-transaction-rate apps."