Solid State Drives to get their own standard

Aug 31, 2007 14:50 GMT  ·  By

JEDEC is an industry association which is specialized in setting the manufacturing standards and a number of technical specifications for some of the most computer hardware parts like the dynamic random access memory, DRAM for short. As the solid state drives are becoming increasingly popular and their price tags drop, the need for a common standard for all SSD manufacturers is gaining one of the first positions on JEDEC's list of things to do.

According to the news site xbitlabs, the JEDEC association announced that it will soon begin the work on a common standard for all solid state drives as this will allow the entire market to evolve faster and will increase the adoption of SSD storage solutions as replacement for the traditional hard disk drives or as complementing storage options. "JEDEC has initiated standardization for the solid state drive (SSD) segment of the computer industry. This nascent market is poised for explosive growth as the price gap between rotating media hard disks and non-volatile alternatives such as flash drives decreases," a statement by JEDEC reads concerning the adoption of an unified standard.

Solid state drives offer a number of advantages over the original hard disk drive solution as they have no moving parts so they are less prone and susceptible to hardware failures due to mechanical shocks and vibrations. Because SSDs are in fact based on fast access flash memory cells they also use way less power when operating HDDs so they do not heat up as much either while having a much broader temperature operating range. Because of this advantage the solid state drive market is booming and as there are a number of different standards floating around, JEDEC tries to consolidate them into a single unified design.

In an effort to underline the importance of the solid state drives on the future storage market, JEDEC (Joint Electron Device Engineering Council) also announced that from now on the industry standardization group will change its name to JEDEC Solid State Technology Association.