I just found this really cool article from Gizmodo about SSD’s (Solid State Drives).
The cool part is, they are talking about “Windows 8 will be even better for solid-state storage”.
What are Solid State Drives? They contrast them with regular hard drives:
On a basic level, a hard disk drive works thusly: Inside is a magnetised recording surface called a platter that spins around really fast, with a head that zooms across disk to read and write data – think kinda like a record player, except the head never touches the surface, ’cause that would be very, very bad. So, you can see the problem with hard drives: They’re fragile (don’t drop your computer) and they’re slow to access stuff because the head has to physically move to where the data is.
Solid State Drives:
With an SSD, on the other hand, we’re talking straight silicon. What’s inside is a bunch of flash memory chips and a controller running the show. There are no moving parts, so an SSD doesn’t need to start spinning, doesn’t need to physically hunt data scattered across the drive and doesn’t make a whirrrrr.
The result is that it’s crazy faster than a regular hard drive in nearly every way, so you have insanely quick boot times (an old video, but it stands), application launches, random writes and almost every other measure of drive performance (writing large files excepted). For a frame of reference, General Manager of SanDisk’s SSD group, Doron Myersdorf, says an equivalent hard drive would have to spin at almost 40,000rpm to match an SSD.
It’s a really great article.
You can check it out here
Better SSD integration is a must for Windows 8, if they didn’t optomise their OS for SSD’s it would be a very foolish decision. I am convinced that Microsoft and hardware vendors will try to push SSD’s over normal HD’s once windows 8 is released and that this will be the time that we start when SSD’s will become mainstream, this is assuming that capacities will increase to a reasonable volume of course.