When talking about SSD or Solid State Drives, many people use the term flash or flash storage. What’s the difference between SSD and Flash Storage? SSD and Flash Storage may be closely related, but are not the same thing. To understand the difference, you will first have to understand flash storage and SSD individually.
Solid State Drive (SSD)
SSD is a storage device that uses the medium storage flash. To make understanding better, you can think of SSD as a CD and flash storage as the CD Drive. CD Drive is the device, and CD is the medium. This is similar in the case of SSD and Flash Storage.
SSD doesn’t need to use only flash storage as its medium. They can use any medium as long as it is not in motion. In the earlier time, flash storage was not used as a medium in SSD, and this may be the same in the future.
The form factors of solid-state drives are the same as HDDs. This makes it easier for the user to move to solid-state storage from disk-based storage. SSDs have been in existence long before flash storage has. It was around the 1970s that people came to know of SSDs being available in the market.
What Is Flash Storage?
Flash storage, on the other hand, is a storage medium that is often used by solid-state storage. They are silicon chips on which you can write as well as erase the data with electricity. Flash storage is highly used to store enterprise data due to its fast speed. They are much faster than HDDs.
Flash is used in solid-state storage since they have no parts which are in motion. Unlike tape or spinning disks, flash storage is solid. The benefit of this is that flash storage is much more durable and unlikely to fail or break easily.
Another interesting feature of flash storage is that it is non-volatile. This means that the storage medium is capable of retaining information even if the power is switched off. The particular feature makes it quite different from that of Random Access Memory or RAM.
You can rewrite data as and when you want, which is impossible on a DVD or CD. For people who want to make frequent information storage changes, flash storage is the perfect option. It is used in many storages other than SSDs.
Flash storage is used in memory cards, phones, medical devices, laptops, video and digital cameras, calculators, and many others.
To Sum Up
As already mentioned, SSD and flash storage are quite different, despite the terms being used interchangeably. Moreover, SSD is not the only storage device that uses flash storage. In the same way, flash storage is not the only medium that uses SSD.
With the technology change, there may be changes in the use of flash technology as well. Manufacturers are trying to find other storage mediums to be used in SSDs and can effectively replace flash storage.
Currently, flash technology is one of the most favored storage mediums used in different storage devices.
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