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Solid State Hard Disk Drives (SSD) is the new up and coming technology for storage media.
Cost
At the moment Solid State Disks are still relatively expensive compared to their sidekicks Hard Disks. A 32 Gigabyte Solid State disk will cost you around £80. Normal platter disks for the same cash you can get a 1Terabyte disk! Sizes of Solid State Hard Drives are even increasing however the cost also increases exponentially. This cost however does provide some extreme benefits … Extreme read and write speeds as well as long lost data reliability!!
Performance
One of the fastest platter hard drives offered today is Western Digitals Velociraptor 300 Gb Model with 16MB Cache and Sata/300. In tests this achieved a transfer rate of 125 Mb/s. Due to SSD drives still be heavily concentrated with Research and Development to optimize the technology and lower the cost down to something your average home user could use speeds are varying. However a new recent drive produced by OCZ at the CeBit 2009 demoed a 1 Terabyte SSD disk with a read speed of 700mb!!
Reliability
Due to Solid State Disks unique selling point of no moving parts , giving them a better shock resistance and temperate range for use, they will be the choice by users in extreme conditions. There are limitations on the hard disks though due to the fundamentals of NAND technology, there is a limitation of how many erase cycles performed.