Term "solid state" comes from SOLID STATE PHYSICS which refers to the use of semiconductor devices rather than electron tubes
. A solid state drive is a data storage device which is used for the storage of solid state memory for presistent data. As there are no moving parts solid state drives are less fragile than hard Disk, they are also silent unless a cooling fan is used.
First auxilliary memory SOLID STATE DRIVE (SSD) was emerged in the era of Vaccum tubecomputer, later on the usage was discontinued, as cheaper drum storage units was made available. In 1970s and 1980s there was need of SSD in semiconductor memory for early supercmputers of IBM, AMDAHI & CRAY. In 1978 STORAGE TEK developed the first moden type of SSD.
In 1995 M- system introduced a flash base solid state drives. Since then Miitary and Areospace industries are successfully using SSD as HARD DISK DRIVE REPLACEMENT. In 2008 low end notebooks appered with SSD and by the 2009 it also started appearing in laptops. An SOLID STATE DRIVE is commonly composed of DRAM volatile memory or primarily NAND FLASH non volatile memory.
Mostly all manufactures of SSD use non volatile flash memory to create rugged and compact devices. They are also know as flash drives which dosenot require any battries. Flash SSD also retain the memory during power failure. MICRONINTEL SSD made faster flash drives by implementing data striping and interleaving. It allowed a creation of ULTRA FAST SSDs with 250 MBs effective.
Till now SSD were too costly for widespread use in mobile computing. Solid state disk is now accurately being named as SOLID STATE DRIVE - they have no disk but fuction as a drives.