A solid state drive is a storage device that uses solid state memory to store data.

While
technically not a disk, a solid state drive will often be referred to as a solid state disk drive, or a
solid state disk, in reference to the fact that, in some ways, it replaces the traditional hard disk
drive.

Hard disk drives have been a faithful servant to computing for many years. But with heads,
platters, magnetic surfaces, spindles and an array of other complex moving parts, they are most
certainly fallible. They can be slow, too: disks have to start spinning if they're not already doing
so, then they have to get the head to the correct position on the disk to read or write the data. Add
this to the physical problems occurring when a piece of dust or other foreign object gets into the
mechanism, or when an impact jolts the drive, and we have a distinctly imperfect system. Solid
state drives address many of these timing and structural problems inherent in the hard disk drive.

The principle behind solid state drives is that there should be no moving parts: no spinning
platters, no moving heads. Data is split into word length pieces and stored in memory. It is then
accessed almost instantaneously using unique system-wide addresses. This behaviour has been
used in computer RAM for many years, but for a long time it was too expensive for
manufacturers to consider using it as persistent storage in sufficient volumes to replace the hard
disk drive.

Solid state disks use either NAND flash or SDRAM (non-volatile and volatile storage
respectively). NAND flash is so-called because of the NAND-gate technology it uses and is
common in USB flash drives and many types of memory card. NAND flash based drives are
persistent and can therefore effectively mimic a hard disk drive. Synchronous dynamic random
access memory (SDRAM) is volatile and requires a separate power source if it is to operate
independently from a computer.

Solid state drives may be preferred over traditional disk drives for a number of reasons. The first
advantage is found, as mentioned briefly above, in the speed of operation. Because hard disk
drives need to be spinning for the head to read sectors of the platter, sometimes we have to wait
for "spin up" time. Once the disk is spinning, the head must seek the correct place on the disk,
and from there the disk must spin just enough so that the correct data is read. If data is spread
over different parts of the disk (fragmented) then this operation is repeated until all the data has
been read or written. While each individual operation only takes fractions of a second the sum of
them may not. It is often the case that reads to and writes from the hard disk are the bottleneck in
a system.

Because the information on solid state drives can be accessed immediately (technically at the
speed of light) there is no latency experience when data is transferred. Because there is no
relationship between spatial locality and retrieval speed, there is no degradation of performance
when data is fragmented.
Consequences of the increased speed of writes for fragmented data include a much decreased
application start up time: SanDisk, for instance, claim to have achieved Windows Vista start up
times of around 30 seconds for a laptop with its SSD SATA 5000 2.5".

Solid state drives also enjoy greater stability over their disk counterparts. Because there are no
moving parts there is less that can go wrong mechanically. Dust entering the device ceases to
become a problem (and in any case solid state drives can be sealed air tight unlike disk drives
which require a certain air cushion to function properly), and dropping the drive is less likely to
cause damage to the data. There are no heads so head crashes are a thing of the past.

This speed and stability comes at a price, of course, and in early models prices of even the most
modest of solid state capacities greatly surpassed that of the largest hard disks

Total cost of ownership—that’s the real value proposition for solid state storage. Although still
in the development stage, solid state storage solutions can offer:

• Lower power consumption compared to hard drives

• Improved performance
• Improved environmental balance

But also know that solid state storage technology can present its own set of challenges:

• Higher acquisition cost

• Lower life expectancy
• Lower capacities
Wiki

A solid-state drive (SSD) is a data storage device that uses solid-state memory to store
persistent data. An SSD emulates a hard disk drive interface, thus easily replacing it in most
applications. An SSD using SRAM or DRAM (instead of flash memory) is often called a RAM-
drive, not to be confused with a RAM disk.

The original usage of the term solid-state (from solid-state physics) refers to the use of
semiconductor devices rather than electron tubes, but in this context, has been adopted to
distinguish solid-state electronics from electromechanical devices as well. With no moving parts,
solid-state drives are less fragile than hard disks and are also silent (unless a cooling fan is used);
as there are no mechanical delays, they usually enjoy low access time and latency.

Flash drives

Most SSD manufacturers use non-volatile flash memory to create more rugged and compact
devices for the consumer market. These flash memory-based SSDs, also known as flash drives,
do not require batteries. They are often packaged in standard disk drive form factors (1.8-inch,
2.5-inch, and 3.5-inch). In addition, non-volatility allows flash SSDs to retain memory even
during sudden power outages, ensuring data persistence. SSDs are slower than DRAM and some
designs are slower than even traditional HDDs on large files, but flash SSDs have no moving
parts and thus seek times and other delays inherent in conventional electro-mechanical disks are
negligible.

Components:

• Cache: A flash-based SSD uses a small amount of DRAM as a cache, similar to the cache
in Hard disk drives. A directory of block placement and wear leveling data is also kept in
the cache while the drive is operating.

• Energy storage: Another component in higher performing SSDs is a capacitor or some

form of batteries. These are necessary to maintain data integrity such that the data in the
 cache can be flushed to the drive when power is dropped; some may even hold power
long enough to maintain data in the cache until power is resumed.

The performance of the SSD can scale with the number of parallel NAND flash chips used in the
device. A single NAND chip is relatively slow, due to narrow (8/16 bit) asynchronous IO
interface, and additional high latency of basic IO operations (typical for SLC NAND - ~25 μs to
fetch a 4K page from the array to the IO buffer on a read, ~250 μs to commit a 4K page from the
IO buffer to the array on a write, ~2 ms to erase a 256 KB block). When multiple NAND devices
operate in parallel inside an SSD, the bandwidth scales, and the high latencies can be hidden, as
long as enough outstanding operations are pending and the load is evenly distributed between
devices.

Micron/Intel SSD made faster flash drives by implementing data striping (similar to RAID0) and
interleaving. This allowed creation of ultra-fast SSDs with 250 MB/s effective read/write, the
maximum the SATA interface can manage.[17]

Advantages

• Faster start-up, as no spin-up is required (RAM & flash).

• Typically fast random access for reading, as there is no read/write head to move (RAM &
flash).[22]
o Extremely low read latency times, as SSD seek-times are orders of magnitude
lower than the best hard disk drives, as of 2008.[23] (RAM) In applications where
hard disk seeks are the limiting factor, this results in faster boot and application
launch times (see Amdahl's law)[24] (RAM & flash).
o Relatively deterministic read performance:[25] unlike hard disk drives,
performance of SSDs is almost constant and deterministic across the entire
storage. This is because the seek time is almost instant and does not depend on the
physical location of the data, and so, file fragmentation has almost no impact on
read performance.
• No noise: a lack of moving parts makes SSDs completely silent, apart from cooling fans
on a few high-end and high-capacity SSDs.
• For low-capacity flash SSDs, low power consumption and heat production when in active
use, although high-end SSDs and DRAM-based SSDs may have significantly higher
power requirements (flash).
 • High mechanical reliability, as the lack of moving parts almost eliminates the risk of
"mechanical" failure (RAM & flash).
o Ability to endure extreme shock, high altitude, vibration and extremes of
temperature: once again because there are no moving parts.[26] This makes SSDs
useful for laptops, mobile computers, and devices that operate in extreme
conditions (flash).[24]
• Larger range of operating temperatures. Typical hard drives have an operating range of 5-
55 degrees C. Most flash drives can operate at 70 degrees, and some industrial grade
drives can operate over an even wider temperature range.[27]
• For low-capacity SSDs, lower weight and size: although size and weight per unit storage
are still better for traditional hard drives, and microdrives allow up to 20 GB storage in a
CompactFlash 42.8×36.4×5 mm (1.7×1.4×.2 in) form-factor. Up to 256 GB, as of 2008
SSDs are lighter than hard drives of the same capacity.[26]
• When failures occur, they tend to happen predominantly while writing, or erasing cells,
rather than upon reading cells. With magneto-mechanical drives, failures tend to occur
while reading. If a drive detects failure on write operations, data can be written to a new
location. If a drive fails on read, then data is usually lost permanently.[28]

[edit] Disadvantages

• Cost: As of mid-2008, SSD prices are still considerably higher per gigabyte than are
comparable conventional hard drives: consumer-grade drives are typically US$1.50 to
US$3.45 per GB[18][29] for flash drives and over US$80.00 per GB for RAM-based
compared to about US$0.38 or less per gigabyte for hard drives.[18]
• Capacity: As of 2008, far lower than that of conventional hard drives (Flash SSD
capacity is predicted to increase rapidly, with experimental drives of 1 TB,[30][31] but hard
drive capacity also continues to expand, and hard drives are likely to maintain their
capacity edge for some time).[32]
• Asymmetric Read vs. Write Performance: Unlike other architectural elements in the
memory hierarchy, storage devices based on NAND Flash memory suffer from write
performance that is typically two orders of magnitude slower than read performance.
Many computer applications rely on synchronous patterns of read/write operations,
wherein a given write or update must be completed and the write confirmed before
additional application read requests can be issued. These include transaction processing
applications, computer operating system "boot-up" and even basic forms of parity-based
RAID. For these applications a Flash SSD can actually be slower than a hard disk drive,
due to the inability of applications to place subsequent read-requests into the device
queue until previous write operations have been completed and acknowledged.[33]
• Lower storage density: Hard disks can store more data per unit volume than DRAM or
flash SSDs, except for very low capacity/small devices.
• Limited write (erase) cycles: Flash-memory cells will often wear out after 1,000 to
10,000 write cycles for MLC, and up to 100,000 write cycles for SLC[18], while high
endurance cells may have an endurance of 1–5 million write cycles (many log files, file
allocation tables, and other commonly used parts of the file system exceed this over the
lifetime of a computer).[34][35][36] Special file systems or firmware designs can mitigate this
problem by spreading writes over the entire device (so-called wear leveling), rather than
 rewriting files in place.[37] In 2008 wear leveling was just beginning to be incorporated
into consumer level devices.[18] However, effective write cycles can be much less,
because when a write request is made to a particular memory block, all data in the block
is overwritten even when only part of the memory is altered. The write amplification, as
referred by Intel, can be reduced using write memory buffer.[38] In combination with wear
leveling, over-provisioning SSD flash drives with spared memory capacity also delays
the loss of user-accessible memory capacity. NAND memory can be negatively impacted
by read and program (write) disturbs arising from over accessing a particular NAND
location. This overuse of NAND locations causes bits within the NAND block to
erroneously change values. Wear leveling, by redirecting SSD writes to lesser-used
NAND locations, thus reduces the potential for program or write disturbs.[39] An example
for the lifetime of SSD is explained in detail in this wiki.[dubious – discuss] SSDs based on
DRAM, however, do not suffer from this problem.
o As a result of wear leveling and write combining, the performance of SSDs
degrades with use [40][41]. Eventually, wear leveling will use each page on the drive
at least once, so further writes always involve a block erase. Although write
combining (if supported by the device) offers advantages, it causes internal
fragmentation in the SSD which degrades the sequential read speed. However,
such fragmentation can be mitigated by the operating system, using the TRIM
command.
• Slower write speeds: As erase blocks on flash-based SSDs generally are quite large (e.g.
0.5 - 1 megabyte)[18], they are far slower than conventional disks during small writes
(write amplification effect) and can suffer from write fragmentation.[42] Recent SSDs
mitigate this problem using large DRAM write buffers and intelligent controllers. Also,
modern copy-on-write or log-structured file systems (e.g., btrfs or NILFS) write linearly
to the disk, not triggering the write amplification effect. SSDs based on DRAM, which do
this several orders of magnitude faster than conventional disks, do not suffer from this
problem.
• DRAM-based SSDs (but not Flash-based SSDs) require more power than hard disks,
when operating; and they still use power when the computer is turned off, while hard
disks do not.[43]

Quality and performance

SSD is a rapidly developing technology. A January 2009 review of the market by technology
reviewer Tom's Hardware concluded that comparatively few of the tested devices showed
acceptable I/O performance, with several disappointments,[47] and that Intel (who make their own
SSD chipset) still produce the best performing SSD drive as of this time, a view also echoed by
Anandtech.[48] In particular, operations that require many small writes, such as log files, are
particularly badly affected on some devices, potentially causing the entire host system to freeze
for periods of up to one second at a time.[49]

According to Anandtech, this is due to controller chip design issues with a widely used set of
components, and at least partly arises because most manufacturers are memory manufacturers
only, rather than full microchip design and fabrication businesses - they often rebrand others'
products,[50] inadvertantly replicating their problems.[51] Of the other manufacturers in the market,
Memoright, Mtron, OCZ, Samsung and Soliware were also named positively for at least some
areas of testing.

The overall conclusion by Tom's Hardware however, was that "none of the [non-Intel] drives
were really impressive. They all have significant weaknesses: usually either low I/O
performance, poor write throughput or unacceptable power consumption".[47]

[edit] Applications

A use for flash drives is to run lightweight operating systems designed specifically for turning
general-purpose PCs into network appliances comparable to more expensive routers and
firewalls. In this situation, a write protected flash drive containing the whole operating system is
used to boot the system. A similar system could boot from CD, floppy disk or a traditional hard
drive but flash memory is a good choice because of very low power consumption and failure
rate.

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drives-and.aspx. Retrieved on 2009-05-27.

What's a Solid State Disk (SSD)

A solid state disk / drive (SSD) - is electrically, mechanically and software compatible with a
conventional (magnetic) hard disk.

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 such as flash.

This provides faster access time than a hard disk, because the SSD data can be randomly
accessed in the same time whatever the storage location. The SSD access time does not depend
on a read/write interface head synchronising with a data sector on a rotating disk. The SSD also
provides greater physical resilience to physical vibration, shock and extreme temperature
fluctuations. SSDs are also imune to strong magnetic fields which could sanitize a hard drive.

The only downside to SSDs is a higher cost per megabyte of storage - although in some
applications the higher reliability of SSDs makes them cheaper to own than replacing multiple
failing hard disks. When the storage capacity needed by the application is small (as in some
embedded systems) the SSD can actually be cheaper to buy because hard disk oems no longer
make low capacity drives. Also in enterprise server acceleration applications - the benefit of the
SSD is that it reduces the number of servers needed compared to using hard disk based RAID on
its own.

Historically RAM based SSDs were faster than flash based products - but in recent years the
performance of the fastest flash SSDs has been more than fast enough to replace RAM based
systems in many server acceleration applications.

Both types of SSDs are available in a wide range of form factors and supporting traditional disk
interfaces. A complete list of manufacturers with tables by form factor, technology type and
interface type is updated in real-time in the Solid State Disks Buyers Guide
The reasons that users might benefit from buying SSDs are listed in the SSD Market Adoption
Model

Take the case of SSD speedup in servers. One way of thinking about this concept in computer
architecture is - SSD CPU Equivalency. For a wide range of applications if you take a black box
approach and analyze the overall application performance of a computer system - you would not
know whether that system had more CPUs with hard disks or less CPUs with more SSDs.

Implicit in all my usages of the term "flash SSD" is the assumption that the device includes some
form of controller which performs wear-leveling - as opposed to less smart flash memory storage
which doesn't.

News about SSDs and a directory of all market active SSD oems can be seen on
STORAGEsearch.com's main SSD page.

..

CONTENTS

What is SSD?