Erk Changsila
Biology Department
George Mason University

Solid state drives are not a new technology, however have become more popular in the last few years.  Solid State Drives, also known as SSDs, have always been known as an expensive addition to ordinary home workstations, but are now becoming for users other than pure enthusiasts.  With more advances memory technology and substantially decreased production costs, the current cost for a SSD is around 1USD/GB.  The reason why SSDs have been more popular for gaming enthusiasts and powerful home rigs is because of their outstanding performance.  An entry level SSD is capable of 250MB/s (megabytes per second) read and write throughput with over 80,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second).  A traditional spinning platter drive typically offers around 80-120MB/s with a significantly reduced access time.  SSDs also are beneficial for portable platforms since they have no moving parts, thus making them resistant to shock and vibration.  The one downfall to modern day SSDs are that they are significantly more expensive than traditional hard drive, and have a tendency to fail without warning.  SSDs also have a limited amount of read/writes to each sector of the drive, rendering them less useful for large file copying operations and data processing.  Although there are significant downfalls for SSDs now in 2012, they are becoming increasingly faster, cheaper, and more reliable, making them the data storage platform of choice for the future.