The hows and whys of SSDs

[Thrax]

Solid State Disks are poised blow the doors off of traditional storage media. As the inevitable end-game of the great bet on flash memory, they are coming in strengthening numbers to obliterate benchmarks, make or break companies, and free-fall in price. The revolution this nascent market is set to unleash will leave few questions as it makes a staggering rise to preeminence.


[B]The history of f... Continue reading (http://icrontic.com/articles/how_ssds_work)

[Snarkasm]

Exceptional article as always, Thrax. Excellent coverage and breadth.

[Buddy J]

The width and girth of this treatise are exorbitant!

[Winfrey]

These drives can really help out laptop performance IMO. Laptops have those really slow rotational speeds (usually 5400RPM) which cuts into performance more than you would think, especially high end ones.

[Zuntar]

SSD have a long way to go before I'll even consider one.

[Mario]

Recently, I started seriously looking at getting a solid state drive (SSD) as my primary boot drive. After careful consideration, I have concluded that they still are not ready for prime time from the enthusiast gamer's point of view. The two biggest deterrent factors are the cost of SSD's and their life expectancy. As of today, an Intel X25-M SATA Solid-State Drive costs $US595 in quantities of 1000. Another very disturbing issue is the fact that regular defragmentation of a solid state drive would dramatically decrease it's life expectancy. As it stands, the earliest I see myself having an SSD is sometime around 2010.

[Thrax]

Fragmentation is not an issue. SSDs intentionally fragment files across the drive in a process called "wear leveling." Wear leveling assures that no one flash cell gets more work than others, thereby extending the life of the drive. If a file were stored in 100,000 places or in one contiguous block, an SSD would be able to load that file at the same speed.

Defragmentation is a cheap hack to sweep the performance limitations of mechanical drives under the rug. Defragging exists because there are performance penalties if the mechanical drive head needs to see files all over the disk.

Secondly, the longevity (MTBF) of the newest generation of Intel SSDs is as long or longer than traditional drives. Reliability has reached parity, it's not really a concern any more.

I do, however, agree that the price needs to come down.

[james braselton]

HI THERE I KNOW WHY FLASH IS BETTER THEN A HARD DRIVE I STILL HAVE A FULLY WORKING COMADORE 64 I BET NO ONE ELSE HAS A COMADORE 64 AND GAMES FOR IT AND A BAUD 2400 MODEM OPTINAL AT THAT TIME SO 64 KB KILOBYETS VERSES A 64 GB SOLID STATE FLASH DRIVE USEING FLASH CHIPS

[primesuspect]

Actually our friend Tim is looking for Commodore 64 stuff. I think you guys would get along well.

[Celcho]

Thrax, you should be a research analyst on wall street... A shame there barely is one anymore. Excellent work, though, as always.

[pigflipper]

Hey Ryan, forget your log in password?

[Thrax]

Sup, Celcho! :D

[primesuspect]

Celcho! :D

[QCH]

Bump for an awesome article!!!

[David]

What is 100GiB?

The article states you could write 100GiB per day for 5 years before approaching failure.

[Buddy J]

Hi David. Here ya go:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GiB

[Thrax]

The article links to this wikipedia entry on one of the pages: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KiB

Basically, the SI units kilo-, mega-, giga- all refer to powers of 1000. The word "gigabyte" suggests that it's composed of 1000 megabytes. But that's not how storage works, because storage is ACTUALLY based on powers of 1024. A gigabyte is ACTUALLY 1024 megabytes.

I wanted to be very clear about how much data the drive can write.

8 bits = 1 byte
1024 bytes = 1 kibibyte (1KiB)
1024 kibibytes = 1 mibibyte (1MiB)
1024 mibibytes = 1 gibibyte (1GiB)

This discrepancy is why a "250GB" hard drive (Which you would think is 250,000 megabytes) is actually 244,000 mibibytes, because the computer judges values in powers of 1024. So 250,000/1024 = 244,000.

It's confusing and stupid.