If you drop a hard disk from a desk when it's running, don't expect to be able to get anything off it without it first being sent to a disaster recovery centre. This is one of the main failings of hard drives and so it's not surprising that they haven't made their way into more devices or items that need to be used in rugged environments.

And so the technology world has been waiting for a solution, an answer that will allow them to carry vast amounts of data around without fear of it being trashed because you drop it on a dirt track. Well now that call has been answered with the invention of the SSD or Solid State Drive a new technology that gives us an incredible amount of storage with no moving parts.

What these drives do is to utilise semiconductor memory which has actually been around for a very long time but which has suffered from being high price and low capacity. Now that technology has moved on we can get SSD that offers similar capacity to hard disk drives and much faster access times.

Access speed is where these drives really win out, too. Old mechanical drives obviously have to move heads across a platter and pick up data from the disk before passing it back to the bus to be process. SSD simply takes the data straight to the bus. It's instant access (well, almost) and therefore useful in critical environments such as measuring and emergency systems.

What's more, because the components can be fitted on a board rather than having to be encased in bulky boxes, they become more portable and can be used in many more devices. For example, you may have an old laptop with a creaky hard drive that is maybe on its way out and in need of replacement. The traditional way to do this is to take it back to the shop where the technician will spend an hour or so removing the old drive and replacing it.

Now you can simply pop in an SSD mounted on a PCMCIA board right into the expansion slot of the PC - an instant hard drive.

Of course, as with hard drives the capacity of these devices will constantly increase but also just like hard drives the prices will continue to tumble making them the ideal consumer device that we can all afford.

Solid State Drives have been available for a several years now,and offer a considerable advantage in terms of speed of access compared to conventional hard drives.

Installing Windows 7 Operating System on an SSD can improve start up times markedly, but it is important to realise that the way SSDs work is different to conventional hard drives.

In this article,I will be offering several tips to optimise your SSD with Windows 7.

So,what is the difference between a Solid State Drive and a conventional one?

SSDs employ similar technology to that found in flash memory cards such as those found in Digital Cameras and camcorders. They have no moving parts,have fast access times and the information stored on them is 'non volatile'.This means that data is stored permanently even when the power is shut off.

SSD Drive

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