By Joanne De Peralta
and Wilson Wei Sheng Wang
Much has been written about solid state disks (SSDs) becoming
the next big thing(1) in the IT industry. But as to whether
or not we have enough knowledge of how it will revolutionize the
industry is a different question. How much do we really know about
SSDs? If we are to ask people on the streets, it wouldn't come as
a surprise that they dont know much of what an SSD is. Even if they
do know, most probably it would be limited to a USB pen drive, a
CompactFlash or a Secure Digital card, which are more on the consumer
side of the storage industry.
Technically speaking, they are not wrong. Most web definitions describe
an SSD as a high-performance plug-and-play storage device that contains
no moving parts. Therefore, given that most of the aforementioned
mobile disk storage devices contain no movable parts, they can certainly
be categorized as SSDs.
But then again, there's more to SSDs than being a non-volatile device.
The purpose of this article is to give readers a clearer picture
of what an SSD is, its usage as well as its difference when pitted
against the predominant data storage device at present - the hard
disk drive (HDD). More than its non-volatility, this article will
reveal how much potential SSDs have in optimizing the performance
of the computing system.
SSD Defined
Here are several ways the SSD is defined:
"A solid state disk (SSD) is electrically, mechanically and
software compatible with a conventional (magnetic) hard disk or
winchester. The difference is that the storage medium is not magnetic
(like a hard disk) or optical (like a CD) but solid state semiconductor
such as battery backed RAM, EPROM or other electrically erasable
RAMlike chip. This provides faster access time than a disk, because
the data can be randomly accessed and does not rely on a read/write
interface head synchronising with a rotating disk. The SSD also
provides greater physical resilience to physical vibration, shock
and extreme temperature fluctuations. The only downside is a higher
cost per megabyte of storage."(2)
"Abbreviated SSD, a solid state disk is a high-performance plug-and-play
storage device that contains no moving parts. SSD components include
either DRAM or flash memory boards, a memory bus board, a CPU, and
a battery card. Because they contain their own CPUs to manage data
storage, they are a lot faster (18MBps for SCSI-II and 44 MBps for
UltraWide SCSI interfaces) than conventional rotating hard disks
; therefore, they produce highest possible I/O rates. SSDs are most
effective for server applications and server systems, where I/O
response time is crucial. Data stored on SSDs should include anything
that creates bottlenecks, such as databases, swap files, library
and index files, and authorization and login information."(3)
For the rest of the article, we will compare the HDDs and Flash-based
SSDs. The latter are the most popular type of SSDs employed by the
military, aerospace, industrial and embedded systems industries.
1Read article at http://www.storagesearch.com/view40.html
2Source: http://www.sparcproductdirectory.com/curtisart.html
3Source: http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/S/solid_state_disk.html
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