SSD Defined - Part 1

Hard disk failure is a common occurrence in this age of desktops & notebooks. Plenty of horror tales have been told, passed around & even published about how valuable knowledge was lost & the agony of trying to retrieve or at least save a portion of the crashed hard drive. It is in the coursework of this time that people wonder, why do hard disks fail?

The reason is simple - wear & tear. Like any lovely elderly machine with mechanical parts, HDDs tend to deteriorate over time. HDDs consist of rotating, magnetically coated disks, known as platters that are used to store knowledge. This rotating motion of the mechanical arms leads to much wear & tear after long periods of use. The operational lifespan of a computer HDD is over years.)

A Flash-based SSD is different. Although the most common Flash chips have around 300,000 write cycles, the best Flash chips are rated at,000,000 write cycles per block. On top of that, Flash SSD manufacturers employ different ways to increase the longevity of the drives. In some cases, they use a "balancing" algorithm to monitor the number of times each disk block has been written, which greatly extends the operational lifespan of the drive. Furthermore, these manufacturers also designed special "wear-leveling" algorithms where time a definite percentage threshold for a given block is reached, the SSD will swap the knowledge in that block with the knowledge in another block that has exhibited a "read-only-like" characteristic in the background. This reduces performance lag & avoids further wearing off of the blocks & thrashing of the disk. Even with usage patterns of writing/reading gigabytes per day, a Flash-based SSD ought to last several years, depending on its capacity. Add to that the inclusion of a DRAM cache in the disk architecture that further enhances its operational capabilities as well as lifespan.

Speeding Up

With the speedy paced lifestyle these days, most businesses are time-bound & cannot afford a slowing down in their transactions. This makes speed of HDDs a vital point in technological purchases. The typical access time for a Flash based SSD is about 35 - 100 s, whereas that of a rotating disk is around,000 -0,000 s. That makes a Flash-based SSD about 100 times faster than a rotating disk.

This however raises another point - what is the benefit of a high-speed SSD when the whole process cannot support it? The evolution of CPUs in terms of performance has far surpassed the development of the knowledge storage process. The HDD is actually limiting the potential of a computer process when they are unable to keep up with the performance of the other parts, the CPU. If an HDD is replaced by a high-speed SSD, the performance would significantly improve. The resulting process would be a high-powered set up that can go beyond the demands of high-speed business or military environments.