SSDs Are Making Life Hard For Hard Drives

Stop. Look. Listen to your drive; hear what it’s saying.
If the drive in your new notebook isn’t saying anything—that is, it isn’t making any noise at all—it might be part of the vanguard of a storage invasion. Hard drives are making way for flash memory, and SSDs (solid-state drives) are fueling the revolution.

A Long Hard Drive

The hard drive has had a long and illustrious reign. But as with the new flash-based storage upstarts, the hard drive also came to power in a revolutionary manner.

Back in the early 1980s, if you wanted to run an application on your personal computer, you first had to load it from a floppy diskette (or, more often, a small stack of them). There wasn't much in the way of multitasking, either: If you needed to run a different program, you had to quit the application you were using and then load the new one. It didn't help matters that the floppy drives of the time were highly unreliable, and the diskettes were very easy to damage.

Later in the decade, the hard drive made its way down to personal computers from the business world. This miraculous storage device had enough room for many floppies’ worth of data. More importantly, you could install an application (that is, copy the contents of its diskettes to the hard drive one time) and then launch it from the hard drive whenever you liked.