Solid-state drive (flash SSD)
Unidad de estado sólido (SSD) de memoria flash
- Date
- 1991 · confidence medium
- Place
- SanDisk (SunDisk), Santa Clara, California, United States
- Credited to
- Eli Harari, Sanjay Mehrotra and Jack Yuan (SanDisk); first 20 MB SSD for the IBM ThinkPad
- People
- 👤 Eli Harari1945–👤 Sanjay Mehrotra1958–
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What it is
Storage device based on flash chips that emulates a hard disk with no moving parts, with near-instant access. It transformed the performance of laptops, phones and data centres.
Battery-backed RAM-based SSDs existed from the 1970s (Dataram Bulk Core, 1976); SanDisk's flash version was the first practical one.
What it led to
- Ultra-thin laptops and phones with rugged storage
- Databases and data centres with minimal latency for the cloud
- The obsolescence of the hard disk in consumer devices