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On Christmas
morning, or soon
thereafter, your
laptop will go silent.
So will your family’s
video camera. The
quiet will spread
worldwide. In Delhi,
)
the huge data centers that store your customers’ information will fall into an electronic hush. Even your TiVo will go mute.
There will be no more fy wheels. No more
fans. No more hard-drive platters spinning for data, gorging on electricity, and
clattering to an apocalyptic stop whenever the power goes out. Because moving
parts are dead. The new state of our union
will be: solid.
Before we bid the conventional hard-disk drive (HDD) adieu, however, let us
hail the white-jacketed folks at IBM who
invented it in 1956. They were not engineers. They were magicians. They fgured
out a way to translate analog information
(a song, say, or a photograph) into digits—
specifcally, a long series of zeroes and
ones—and then to magnetically “stick”
millions of those digits to a circular platter
for storage, recoverable for future use. The
result, the HDD, looks exactly like a tiny
record player: There’s a spinning disk and
an arm that hovers over it. To save a document, the disk spins and the arm looks for
empty space on the surface, where it magnetically “writes” zeroes and ones; to
recover information, the process works in
reverse. In either direction, it takes time,
and lots of electricity.
Now, imagine reducing that time and
energy to almost zero. It’s possible with a
solid-state drive, or SSD. The digits on an
SSD are not physical, per se; instead, they
are electrical charges (either positive or
negative), stored by microscopic transistors. The computer sees those transistors
as either “on” or “off” and interprets that
“state” as either a zero or a one. In other
words, with SSDs, there is no need for the
computer to do a physical search for data
on a spinning hard drive. There is just an
126 Fast company December 2008 / January 2009
