While the technological innovations in the field of data storage have proved to be of major help in resolving data storage problems, it has also led us to expect more and more of the technology. Therefore, just when one technological innovation hits the market, we expect a better alternative from technological experts soon thereafter. One such breakthrough innovation has been the new high data storage flash drive.
Flash Drive: Technological Innovations
Flash drives were introduced in the data storage market in the 1990s and continue to play a very important role in meeting the data storage and data backup needs of the consumers. However, at the time of invention, the major drawback associated with these flash drives was the limited amount of data storage space offered by these devices.
Flash drives have indeed come a long way since then, from being used as secondary data storage devices to now being used as primary data storage devices. Recently, Sony launched a Vaio laptop which uses flash memory rather than using the traditional hard disk. Sony’s computer is the first of its kind to hit the computer market because so far no computer has used flash memory instead of magnetic storage.
Industry experts believe that though flash drives have always offered a competition to the traditional hard drives, with the advent of Sony’s computer, the competition has just got tougher. In fact, Samsung has recently announced the launch of a 64-GB flash drive and it is predicted that close competitors will soon follow this trend.
While the cost per bit of data storage for a flash drive still remains higher than that of a hard drive, the manufacturers are fast realising the other benefits offered by flash drives which offset this limitation to a large extent; flash drives are lighter than hard disks, use less power, allow faster data access, and run silently. We will explore the various advantages and disadvantages of flash drives as compared to traditional hard disks in the following section.
Benefits and Drawbacks of Flash Drives as Compared to Traditional Hard Disks
Industry experts agree that flash drives are far more reliable than hard disks because flash drives do not consist of any moving parts. Hard drives lose data very easily even if they are slightly mishandled or not stored appropriately because they are made up of complex internal working structure. Flash drives are not only easy to use but also easy to maintain. As compared to hard disks, flash drives require minimal handling or storage precautions.
While using laptop computers is easy and allows portability of data, the ever-hungry battery of the laptop is a concern for most of the users. Traditional hard drives consume a lot of battery power because hard disk platters spin at a very fast rate constantly.
With the advent of high storage capacity flash drives, the need to spin the hard drive in order to read or retrieve data is eliminated. Therefore, the rate at which the data is read and accessed is far higher when users use flash drives instead of using hard disks. The data storage capacity offered by the flash drives is the biggest disadvantage of the flash drive as compared to a hard drive. In addition, the cost of data storage is still higher for flash drives as compared to the traditional hard drive.
Are Hard Disks Going to be Obsolete Soon?
Even though flash drive has undergone a lot of technological innovations, hard drive will still continue to dominate the data storage market for sometime to come. The cost per MB of data storage is still lower for hard drives as compared to flash drives. Therefore, hard drives are still ideal for storing large volumes of data.
What Are Hybrid Drives?
A hybrid drive is a unique combination of a hard disk drive and flash drive. A hybrid hard drive is considered to be a sort of buffer hard disk drive. During normal computer usage, a hybrid drive utilizes a huge buffer of non-volatile flash memory to cache data. It is because of the use of this buffer for non-volatile data storage that the platters of the hard drive need not spin continuously. Since the platters do not need to spin constantly, the data can be accessed faster and the power consumption is reduced significantly. In addition, the computer is also able to boot faster than the traditional hard disk drive.
James Walsh is a freelance writer and copy editor. If you are concerned about data loss and would like more information on
Data Recovery see http://www.fields-data-recovery.co.uk
