[telecom] How SSDs conquered mobile devices and modern OSes

How SSDs conquered mobile devices and modern OSes

With flash ascendant, OS vendors have disabled defragging and supported TRIM.

by Lee Hutchinson Ars Technica June 25 2012

In part one of our "SSD Revolution" series, we covered the basics of flash memory in solid state drives, walking through lots of important but esoteric details such as the difference between NAND flash and NOR, or how SSD reads and writes work. We also talked about the techniques used to make SSDs faster and to prolong their lives. But SSDs don't just exist in a vacuum-the state of solid state, such as it is, has had a significant effect on the shape of the modern mobile device landscape, which we explore now in part two.

Not long ago, flash-based MP3 players occupied the low end of the capacity spectrum and, while some brave souls were using PCMCIA compact flash cards in their laptops, you still needed a real hard disk drive to effectively boot and use Windows or OS X. Not anymore-not only are flash-powered, high-capacity MP3 players and laptops standard, but modern operating systems are quickly adapting to SSDs as the norm.

An entire class of ultrabooks-which, in spite of what the name suggests, do not contain hyperdrives, organic CPUs based on alien DNA, or anything else truly deserving of the "ultra" prefix-are now built around the MacBook Air's design philosophy of being durable, thin, light... and stuffed full of NAND flash. Laptops of this form factor seem poised to deliver on most of the promises that netbooks once made (especially portability and battery life) without falling prey to the same set of compromises that ultimately doomed netbooks to hobbyist devices.

Tablets, too, are on the rise. The tablet segment of the mobile device market didn't even meaningfully exist prior to 2010-say what you will about the iPad, but it truly sparked a revolution. Since their rise to prominence, all mainstream tablets have been exclusively flash-powered devices; there's not a hard disk to be found anywhere in the lot. While the SSD craze might be sweeping the "real" computer segment as flash storage becomes more common on desktops and laptops, the place where NAND flash most truly empowers consumers is in mobile devices.

But things were not always thus, and flash wasn't always the best choice for mobile devices to store data.

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