Properties of Solid State Media
Computer Science: OCR GCSE, topic 1.2.9
Properties of Solid State Media
Solid state media has a lot of benefits, but it isn't the best media in all scenarios.
High speed
- Solid state media tends to have very fast read/write times.
- Some solid state media has slower access time. For example, USB sticks.
High cost
- Solid state media has a higher cost-per-GB than magnetic media.
- Solid state drives (SSDs) do not last as long as hard disk drives (HDDs), so the cost can often seem restrictive.
- Some people choose to pay more for the increase in performance.
Good capacity
- SSDs have a good capacity, but not on the scale of optical or magnetic media.
Good reliability
- Solid state media is very reliable and robust:
- It rarely fails (until read/write limit is hit).
- It is not easily damaged by shocks.
- Once the read/write cycles are used up, then the drive will fail.
Test yourself on Properties of Solid State Media
A home computer user's solid state drive (SSD) has failed. They are trying to find out why this has happened, but the only thing that they have done differently recently is use virtual memory. Why has their SSD failed?