Article
No moving parts: the rise of solid-state storage
For a designer trying to make kiosks as small, quiet and efficient as possible, the hard drive often represents the biggest stumbling block. Solid-state memory products continue to evolve, and might soon provide an answer.
August 21, 2005 by James Bickers — Editor, Networld Alliance
Although it is not a computer in the traditional sense of the word, FingerGear's "Computer-On-a-Stick" packs a lot of computing punch. It looks like a typical USB Flash drive, but under the hood rests a fully configured operating system, an open-source software suite compatible with Microsoft Office, Web browser, e-mail client and a complete battery of must-have applications. Just connect to a motherboard and processor, and voila - a complete computing device.
Cost? $149.
"It could drive a kiosk," said John Louis, founder of the California-based company Bionopoly that makes the device. "The kiosk would have to have the shell of the computer - a motherboard and a monitor and keyboard - but it essentially replaces the Windows OS and Office."
And, of course, it replaces the hard drive. Hard drives are big, they can be noisy, and they generate a lot of heat - all things that are best avoided, and all things solved by using solid-state storage instead of a rotating drive.
A tech primer
Solid-state storage mechanisms such as CompactFlash and SmartMedia are examples of EEPROMs, or electrically erasable programmable read-only memory. They have no moving parts, but instead are made up of rows and columns of cells; at every intersection there are two transistors, separated by a thin oxide layer, which allow each cell to store one bit of binary information.
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One characteristic that makes solid-state memory such a powerful tool is that, unlike RAM, it does not require a power source in order to maintain data - unplug it, and the data remains in place. This means that hard drives built upon a solid-state storage mechanism can replace traditional "spinning wheel" drives.
Take video slot machines, for instance. According to Gary Drossel, director of product marketing and business development for SiliconSystems, hard drives in video slot machines are constantly spinning, so that response time can be as quick as it should be. "This not only wears out the mechanics of the drive, but it uses a lot of power and generates a lot of heat," he said.
Drossel said that e-voting apps also are a natural fit for solid-state drives, or SSDs, since the software driving them can make data read-only immediately after it is written. "The vote could be verified, but not altered," he said.
Lower prices on the horizon?
So what's stopping widespread adoption of SSDs? Apparently, as is often the case, price is the culprit.
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"I definitely do see a day where (SSDs) are finally cheap enough and fast enough to hold my operating system and all my software and data," said computer consultant Scott Hendison, owner of Portland Technology Consultants. "With no moving parts, it shouldn't wear out. But for me, the portability is an even bigger benefit. Why not have 20 gigs hanging around my neck? USB 2.0 is plenty fast, so the only downside is cost."
The irony is that when cost-per-gigabyte is analyzed, SSDs are sometimes cheaper, as in the case of small portable "pen drives." In high-end enterprise computing solutions, large SSDs deliver a speed boost that would require costlier CPU upgrades to realize the same performance gain.
In that middle ground - where most business and consumer storage needs exist - rotating drives remain much less expensive. But prices change constantly. According to a study by Semico Research, SSD storage cost about $1 per megabyte in 2003 - which is precisely what hard drives cost just a decade earlier. There will come a point of diminishing returns, beyond which hard drive space cannot get much cheaper, and that is when the two price points will begin to converge more quickly.
For kiosk developers, it may be possible to make the move to solid-state sooner than the general computing community. Drossel points out that the application-specific nature of kiosks and self-service devices means that they can get by with smaller, less expensive units.
"Many kiosks run some type of embedded or real-time operating systems, which require less than 1 gigabyte of actual storage," he said. "For these systems, it is possible to realize a cost-savings over rotating HDDs."
About James Bickers
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