The future belongs to Solid-State Drives

Despite their still exorbitant prices, the future of solid-state drives (SSD) for data storage is "bright." This is what Microsoft believes anyway, though you certainly won't find me arguing about this. This news has emerged from an article by distinguished engineer Michael Fortin on the aptly named Engineering Windows 7 blog. Fortin elaborated at length about the optimization and fine-tuning that Microsoft made in the Windows 7 operating system so that it will perform well on SSDs.

Compared to traditional hard disk drives, an SSD is capable of delivering--and I quote from the article--"superior performance, more consistent responsiveness, increased battery life, superior ruggedness, quicker startup times, and noise and vibration reductions." And as the price of flash memory continues to fall, more PCs and laptops will eventually be sold with SSDs as opposed to Winchester--or rotating--hard disk drives.

According to Microsoft, this was what the company has in mind when the engineering team focused an "appropriate amount" of their efforts towards insuring that users of Windows 7 enjoy excellent experiences on their SSDs. And in case you missed it, the final pre-release of Windows 7 was made available to the public earlier this week, and rumors have emerged that the final version of Windows 7 will be arriving before the end of this year.

Incidentally, an evaluation unit of Samsung's latest SSD just arrived earlier this week. I'll give it a spin on the Windows 7 RC and report back on how it fares. - Paul