A really cool use of flash memory that is finally starting to get popular is called the Solid State Drive. A solid state drive is used as a replacement to the typical run of the mill magnetic hard drive. Since it uses flash memory, there are no moving parts, and it is much quieter than a standard hard drive. The best feature is that they are much faster than a magnetic hard drive. They are currently being used in low power applications such as laptops, although enterprise adoption is finally starting to take off. They are still fairly expensive, but as with any other technology, the price will come down as demand increases. It’s only a matter of time before magnetic storage is another page in computer history.
Along these lines, Western Digital has just announced an upcoming 20,000 RPM hard drive, which will be the next addition to its popular Raptor series, in order to try to compete with emerging SSD technology. If you know anything about hard drive technology, 20,000 RPM is twice the rotation speed of the current fastest SATA hard drive (also a Raptor, made by Western Digital). While platter speed is not the only factor that plays into hard drive performance, generally speaking the faster the platters spin, the faster the disk can access data. Will this drive put an end to the SSD market? My money is still on SSD, but I do think that this drive will be a great stop-gap solution until the price of SSD flash storage drives finally comes down to something the average consumer can afford.
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