Nowadays we live in a technological era where we need to store up a lot of information on our drives so that we can look at it again later. Sometimes this information can be incredibly precious for professional purposes – that is the case with work documents and that kind of stuff. Or it can sometimes be precious on an emotional level – such as wedding pictures.
Whatever it may be, we need to keep it stored. There are two types of technology that came in from back in the day that can cause some confusion to a lot of people. These are SSD (solid state disk) and flash storage. These two have no moving parts and can both be reprogrammed and erased, but they are not the same.
Flash Storage
Flash storage is a technology that came from the 1980s, and it was invented by Dr. Fujio Masuoka, who was originally from Toshiba. The name flash came from the reminder that the process of erasing the contents that were stored were similar to a camera’s flash. Flash storage is a relatively old technology, and one that is limited to a certain amount of cycles were the data is stored and erased. As time goes by, the integrity of storage starts declining.
SSD Storage
SSD technology is actually older than flash, but that doesn’t mean it is necessarily worse. These, in the 1950s, were referred to as auxiliary memory units but soon enough they fell out of consumer preference. Only 20 years later did they come back as they were integrated into supercomputers, but they didn’t stay for long as the costs were slowing things down.
Then, in the 1980s, SSD cartridges and modules were introduced, and even though there were some issues related to the loss of content in these, they still managed to survive the unforgiving world of technology. The loss of content occurred whenever a storage chip wasn’t powered and that limited the user to having backup battery power.
Soon enough, in the 1990s, a flash-backed SSD came into play and that solved the loss of memory problems. This meant that the technology could finally thrive and today, flash and SSF technologies can be found pretty much everywhere.
The availability of these two technologies in tiny little cards inside your devices is what allows you to save hundreds and hundreds of photos and videos that would otherwise end up being lost in time. The fact that modern ultrabooks come with SSD makes it so that they can carry gigabytes upon gigabytes of data without having to be giant units. As such, SSD technology (along with flash) has helped the world become more mobile, and as time goes by, we keep on evolving in that direction.