Storage Cat 08 3/10/08 17:12 Page 52
52 ADVERTORIAL
NOT ALL TECHNOLOGIES ARE THE SAME
Solid State Drives… welcome to the future
Words: By Thomas Desramaut, Marketing Manager Imation France, UK & Channel Programs EMEA
The explosion of flash memory technology has dramatically storage applications, special algorithms are deployed within the
increased storage capacity and decreased the cost of non- SSD, providing a method for distributing program and erase
volatile semiconductor memory. The technology has fuelled cycles uniformly. SLC memory cells provide approximately
the proliferation of USB flash drives and is now poised to 100,000 erase/program cycles vs. 10,000 for MLC.
replace magnetic hard disks in some applications. A solid
state drive (SSD) is a non-volatile memory system that Green IT: Reduced power consumption
emulates a magnetic hard disk drive (HDD). The SSD SSD has a much lower power requirement than an HDD.
controller is the brain of the device and controls individual Lower power also means less heat is generated and this has
flash memories and accelerates system performance. a direct impact on energy usage by reducing the energy
needed for cooling.
Speed: high data transfer rates, low access time A study demonstrated the importance of power
To locate and read a particular piece of data on one or more requirement, along with the benefit of high random read IOPS
platters, the HDD heads must find and move to the correct between an Imation SSD vs. an enterprise class 15K RPM
location and then wait for the spinning platter to present the HDD with an application need of 36,000 IOPS. This study
physical data. This typically takes 7 or 8 ms access time for revealed that the total HDD energy cost would be $1,950 per
the best drives, 10 ms in average drives and more for others. year vs. a total SSD energy cost of $7 per year.
Due to its solid state components and the ability to address Each component needs to be faster to keep
any sector of the NAND memory directly (instead of up with users’ demands for their IT
searching for it), an SSD can access the platforms to do more. In
data in approximately 0.1 ms, about addition, as the cost of
100 times faster than an HDD. energy and concern for
When this is done tens of the environment
thousand or hundreds of increases, there is a
thousand of times to complete mainstream trend
an operation such as boot towards lower energy
up, the user easily usage in computing. While
recognises the delay capacities continue to
caused by the HDD. increase, it appears that hard
SSDs can use SLC or drive technology has reached a
MLC (Single/Multiple Level point where higher speed and
Cells) technologies. An SLC flash lower energy usage are at odds and
memory allows a single data bit to be only slight improvements are making it
stored in the memory cell vs. two for an MLC. to market. SSD is for the user who
MLC memory cells take longer to program than SLC needs high performance and wants energy
memory cells. efficiency and financial savings. As one
would expect, those attributes depend on the
Improved tolerance to shock and vibration quality of the SSD, the application being used and also on
An SSD has no moving parts and basically comprises a other hardware in the system.
printed circuit board, a set of NAND flash memory chips, With proper design, an SSD is able to provide high data
SDRAM cache, a memory controller, an interface controller transfer rates, low access time, improved tolerance to shock
and an interface connector such as IDE, SATA, SAS or even and vibration, better life expectancy and reduced power
fibre channel. In addition to the performance and energy consumption. For some applications, the improved
advantages of SSD, the lack of moving parts means that the performance and durability already outweigh the higher cost of
drives can withstand high vibration and shock forces. an SSD relative to an HDD, thereby establishing SSD not only
as the brand new solution for enterprise (blade server and
Better life expectancy raid systems), but also for laptops and workstations.
To achieve lifetime expectancies over 140 years, SSD has a However, users need to be careful as there are considerable
secret called Wear Levelling. To prevent wear due to repeated performance differences in the SSD offering. Welcome to the
program and erase cycles that are commonly done in data future… not all technologies are the same.
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