What is a Solid State Drive???

I've been looking at this SSD stuff but i haven't come to much conclusion. do you use them like ordinary hard drives or some sort of card that you stick to the pci-e slots? can you use raid on them? what about power usage, don't they eat more power than HDDs? thats a downside too you talk about framentation posing less trouble. do they fragment still and how much impact does it have on the SSD function? And how short is their life time?

I can't really tell anything with concrete solid details, since I haven't really ever tried these SSD units, but for what I know of theory... - Slot or SATA/IDE connector They come in all kinds of flavors. The first one I read about was actually a PCI-E device, although there -are- SATA and IDE SSDs too. Of course, which one you find better you just have to look at the bandwidths available... SATA vs PCI-E however is the difference between plugging in something that just seems like any other hard disk, or a whole card that may take up a slot you'll need. - RAID I think so, there's no reason not to be able to! Despite the way they're constructed inside, that is, using something similar to several flash card (Imagine!) all connected together, all being written at the same time, in the end that is all controlled by an internal controller... for the OS, it's just another hard drive. You can even partition the SSDs for as much as I know. - Power usage According to some reading, they consume less power than ordinary hard drives. Seeing as how flash memory doesn't need to be refreshed, seeing as how these SSD drives have no motors that need to be kept spinning, I think it makes total sense. However, there are some SSD drives that are based on ordinary DRAM, meaning that they're fast, have pretty much unlimited write potential but are volatile... meaning, once they're not powered anymore, all data goes poof. Since the latter type needs power constantly for the memory to be kept alive, and seeing how it'll take a few chips to make a sizable enough disk to be of any particular use, the power that it consumes may come near or surpass that of an ordinary hard drive. - Fragmentation For as much theory as I know, fragmentation on memory as a negligible if not nil impact on performance when it comes to reading, writing or seeking data since the access is direct rather than sequential. The memory isn't depending on a spinning metal platter to deliver the appropriate location under a moving head. There may be some downsides to the fragmentation, however, when it comes to ordinary performance I think the impact should be easy to neglect. Of course, you don't really want to be defragging a SSD anyway, since you'll be consuming precious write cycles. - Life span Well, in terms of life when analyzing the write limitations, I think I read somewhere that each cell may have about a 100,000 write cycle lifespan, so, you can still use it freely to some extent, you just won't want to use such a drive to be doing mundane tasks, especially ones that involve much writing. If you install a program or a game from which data will be mostly read, it's ok, but when you start using the drive for things like Windows swap file, then those cycles will wear thin pretty quickly. Sure, the new SSDs are using a technology that allows the writes to be evenly spread across the cells (That is to say, the drive gets all used, rather than having one cell die entirely while others are fresh new) so that the life of the unit altogether is more lengthy, but at some point it'll run out of writes, and when that time comes, it'll just simply die.