Difference between revisions of "Solid State Computer Systems"

Revision as of 16:35, 20 February 2008

A "Solid State" computer is one with little or no moving parts; a fanless system using flash storage or an EPROM based solution as opposed to a typical spinning platter type hard drive. Moving parts have the highest likelihood of failure, due to friction, which also produces heat. Moving parts tend to consume more energy, and make noise. A motionless solid-state computer can be completely silent and highly energy efficient.

Another advantage to solid state computing is that of durability. Solid-state computer systems tend to be far more rugged and tolerant of environmental conditions that would damage or destroy conventional systems. It comes as no surprise that the most significant initial interest in solid state computing came from the military and NASA.

Part of the key to solid state computing is in the non-volatile storage medium. A traditional spinning platter hard drive, such as what is in your common personal computer, has moving parts, which wear down and eventually fail. Solid-state storage utilizes a type of memory with the advantages of RAM, yet without the read only pitfall of ROM.

A company called MSystems invented the first flash memory in 1995. Their NOR flash memory was cost prohibitive and was not nearly as fast as RAM or ROM. They made storage drives using their NOR flash memory that far exceeded the reliability of conventional spinning platter hard drives.

USB thumb drives and compact flash memory was introduced utilizing a less expensive type of flash memory called NAND flash. NAND flash memory is cheaper to produce and has ushered in what will soon be the age of affordable solid-state storage, the end to the old spinning platter hard drive.

NAND based flash memory does have a limitation in the number of times that data can be erased and written. The limitation in today's flash memory is typically around one million writes or more.

Replacing the spinning platter hard drive with a flash drive is only part of constructing a solid-state computer. Advanced cooling with heat sinks and a well designed enclosure facilitating passive air flow also go into the design of a completely friction free no-moving-parts computer system.

There are many examples of solid-state computing devices already widely used in the market today. However, they are specialized devices and not exactly an example of a "personal computer." When people think of a PC, they are usually looking for something to put on the desk and hook up a monitor and keyboard to, or flip open to expose the keyboard and LCD screen in the portable version.

See our guide to Solid State Removable Storage.