Ever booted a PC with a solid state drive. ? It’s almost a religious experience. Speed is hard to believe until you try it.
The SSD is perhaps the most notable upgrade for non-gamers. Most people don’t actually notice that their processor is a little faster or they have a few gigabytes more RAM, but they do notice how much faster Windows starts up — not to mention how much easier it is to run memory-intensive programs like Photoshop. .
Why SSD?
Solid state drives can be many times faster than traditional hard drives i.e. hard drives spinning a physical disk under a read needle. In contrast, SSDs are made up of arrays of tiny capacitors. which can store a charge for long periods of time and are less susceptible to mechanical damage. Because there are no moving parts, data can be read at incredible speeds.
Right now, the main reason to still have a hard drive is cost. At the time of this article’s publication, you can get a new terabyte hard drive for about $50. An SSD of the same capacity costs around $400, which is impractical for most users.
However, a new breakthrough from Toshiba could change all that.
For a long time, the path of progress in flash memory has been building smaller and smaller gates that store less and less charge. However, this process can only continue for so long as small gates become more and more error-prone. Recently, there has been a trend towards deeper memory layering in 3D, getting more memory from the same amount of silicon.
Samsung and the Intel-Micron combine have announced their own 3D memory technology that delivers more capacity at a lower cost than previous technologies.
deep memory
Toshiba’s breakthrough, dubbed BiCS (for Bit Cost Scalable), involves building stacks of gateways with 48 layers deep — other approaches allow only 36. The new technology allows three times the storage capacity without increasing the price or size, which should be three terabyte flash drives. and 400GB microSD cards make the most of your cards essentially eliminating the memory gap for mobile devices.
It would also make flash storage more cost-competitive — if SSDs were about three times as expensive as HDDs (with one TB around $140), OEMS could ditch the HDD from entry-level PCs in favor of pure SSDs. machines.
