Solid State Drives are arguably the most important innovations in computer hardware since the introduction of optical drives, but they have always had two issues preventing them from challenging hard disk drives as the mass storage device of choice for home and small business computers: very high prices per gigabyte and low maximum storage capacities. But now a company from Taiwan called OCZ Technology has smashed the capacity barrier into pieces by releasing an SSD that can store an entire terabyte of data (that’s 1,000 gigabytes)!
Don’t expect to buy one for your home PC just yet unless you have a pretty sizable bank account however. The retail price on this little jewel is a whopping $3,300, which is about $3,200 more than a hard disk drive of the same size. But still, the sheer capacity of this thing has completely crumbled one of the SSD’s two primary barriers to mass adoption, and as with all things electronic we can expect the price to fall dramatically as other companies design, build and sell competing products in the not-so-distant future.
I believe that in a relatively short period of time the hard disk drive will go the way of the floppy, supplanted by massive, yet affordable solid state drives that are much faster and much more durable than the best hard drives on the market today. More information on the OCZ Colossus 1TB Solid State Drive can be found here.
Note: Thanks to my brother Glen for the heads-up!
It couldn’t have come at a better time as I just went through a traumatic hard drive crash! SSDs would effectively end that fear for the majority who don’t back up regularly, like me.