Solid State Storage

Solid state storage keeps data using electronic circuits. It has no moving parts at all, which explains most of how it behaves: nothing spins, nothing slides and nothing has to be moved into position before data can be read or written.

Devices that use solid state storage

• Solid state drives (SSDs) – fitted inside a computer instead of a hard disk drive.
• USB flash drives and SD or microSD cards – removable storage you plug into a device.
• Built-in flash memory – solid state storage fixed inside a device, such as the internal storage of a phone or tablet.

Speed and capacity

With no parts to move, an SSD can find and read data almost immediately. SSDs are the fastest type of secondary storage and have medium to high capacity. If a school replaced the drives in its office computers with SSDs, the machines would reach the login screen in seconds rather than minutes, and large programs would open far sooner.

Strengths

• Durable – with no moving parts it survives drops, knocks and vibration, and magnets do not damage the data.
• Portable – small and light, so it is easy to carry and connect, which suits moving files between devices.
• Low power and silent – nothing spins, so it drains a battery slowly and makes no noise.
• Reliable – there is no fragile mechanism to fail, so it keeps working over long periods of repeated use.

Solid state storage has a higher cost per gigabyte than magnetic storage, so holding the same amount of data costs you more. It also does not last for ever: each part of the memory can only be erased and rewritten a certain number of times, so a drive that is heavily used will eventually stop storing data properly and need swapping for a new one.

USB flash drives and memory cards usually hold less than a full-size SSD, but they are still small, light, durable and easy to plug in. Built-in flash memory is the same technology inside a device, where being tiny, using little power and coping with shocks matters most.