In 1956, IBM shipped the world's first hard
disk drive, or HDD , in the RAMAC 305 system.
The drive used 50 24-inch (61-centimeter)
platters, stored a meager 5 megabytes of data
and took up more room than two refrigerators.
Oh, and the cost? Just $50,000 ($421,147 in
2012 dollars).
Since then, hard drives have grown smaller,
more capacious and, thankfully, less expensive.
For example, the Seagate Momentus laptop
hard drive, with a form factor of just 2.5
inches (6.4 centimeters), offers 750 gigabytes
of storage for less than $100. But even with
advanced protection technologies, the
Momentus drive, like all HDDs, can crash and
burn, taking precious data with it. That's
because hard drives have mechanical parts
that can fail. Drop a laptop, and the read-write
heads can touch the spinning platters. This
almost always results in severe data loss.
Luckily, a new kind of computer drive could
make crashes as obsolete as your Apple IIe.
Known as a solid-state drive, or SSD, it uses
semiconductor chips, not magnetic media, to
store data. Your computer already comes with
chips, of course. The motherboard contains
some that house your device's system memory,
or RAM, which is where information is stored
and processed when your computer is running.
Computer types refer to such memory as
volatile memory because it evaporates as
soon as your machine loses power.
<a href='http://click.buzzcity.net/click.php?partnerid=105590'>
<img src='http://show.buzzcity.net/show.php?
partnerid=105590&get=mweb' alt='m-phone'/></a>
<a href='http://click.buzzcity.net/click.php?partnerid=105590'>
<img src='http://show.buzzcity.net/show.php?
partnerid=105590&get=mweb' alt='m-phone'/></a>
The chips
used in a solid-state drive deliver non-volatile
memory, meaning the data stays put even
without power. SSD chips aren't located on the
motherboard, either. They have their own
home in another part of the computer. In fact,
you could remove the hard drive of your
laptop and replace it with a solid-state drive,
without affecting any other essential
components.
But why would you want to? And what exactly
would the drive look like -- a green, printed
circuit board or a brushed-metal box
resembling a traditional hard drive? We'll
answer those questions on the following pages,
but before we give your machine a makeover,
let's review a few computer science basics.
