Learn About SSD Flash Disk Drives


SSD DISKS AREN'T REALLY NEW ARE THEY?

No. Industrial and Military often use the many heat/vibration tolerance advantages of solid-state drives and have for years. At a high price. But we're in a shift from the original single-layer SLC to much higher chip density multi-layer MLC, lower production costs, higher capacity & speed, better SSD bridge-controller chips, and an upswing in consumer market interest and availability.

ARE SSD's REALLY FASTER THAN HARD DRIVES?

Overall, most are, especially the RECENT models. Some aren't. NAND flash memory technology is changing rapidly, just as say, Compact Flash and other digital camera memory is offered in different speeds and capacities. How fast to you want to go? How much are you willing to pay? Many SSD's are sold spec'd at different Read/Write Transfer-Rates, similar to Sandisk Extreme IV ultra-fast CF cards. A given SSD manufacturer may offer different TIERS of drives - priced accordingly. Beware discontinued, previous generation technology - SSD performance has increased dramatically over the past year.

Can You Digg it? Bookmark To Track News In The SSD Marketplace


SUPER-FAST READS - BUT SLOW WRITES?

Flash memory is faster to Read From - than Write To. So certain things like computer startup, application launch, document opening can benefit dramatically! Conversely, write-intensive apps like Sound or Video Editing, anything which works on SEQUENTIAL writing large files might be better served by cheaper HDD hard disk technology.

TIP: Anything you can do to minimize writes is smart. Bumping up the RAM in your computer along with an SSD drive purchase may be the BEST way to minimize disk swapping in Mac OS X or Windows XP-Vista and help real-world SSD performance. Maxing to 4+gig of RAM along with your flash disk drive purchase makes ALOT of sense. Advances in Operating Systems will begin to factor-in SDD's and in the future will implement far more intelligent means to minimize disk swapping to maxkimize flash disk performance. SLC SSD's have up to 10 TIMES more writeability over the lifespan of the drive than MLC. 'Wear-Leveling' techniques are used to map out worn-out cells and preserve the life - and slowly shrinking capactiy of an SSD over its lifetime.

A great quote from Toshiba illustrates that the right combination of design make for a good SSD: "We believe that three factors are critical: the design of the controller, proven NAND flash technology and experience with the hard disk drive market. The architecture of the controller can have a significant impact on endurance, wear-leveling and performance, and SSD architectural features such as DRAM cache and parallel design are critical to better performance, but are not apparent to the end user."

WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE: SLC VC MLC SSD's?

Flash memory stores information in the voltage levels of transistors and is nonvolatile because those levels don't require power to maintain. Traditionally, digital information storage, including SRAM, DRAM, and early Flash, stored information by toggling each cell between TWO states; a neutral and a charged state; this is a single-level cell (SLC) design. In Multi-Level Cell (MLC) flash, each cell has a neutral voltage and 3 levels of charged state, for a total of 4 states capable of storing two bits of information. This scheme allows more data storage per transistor—and is much cheaper. However, reading more finely differentiated voltages requires finer measurement, which is in turn slower and more error-prone. And - reduces the usable life of the Flash. So SLC is superior in terms of write-performance and lifecycle and priced accordingly, but lower-cost MLC has been catching up on both fronts and is currently dominating the rising SSD segment reaching consumers.

WHERE DO SSD's FIT INTO LAPTOP AND DESKTOP COMPUTING?

Early adopters. Geeks. Laptop and Mobile markets FIRST - because of many benefits of SSD. Every ounce of weight, minute of battery life matters. Expect Hybrid SSD/HDD platter drives are being developed to leverage all factors: Speed, Capacity and Cost.

SSD SPEED BENCHMARKS - GIVE ME THE NUMBERS!

Other sites far more geeky and capable will be SSD bench-testing to within a millisecond of thier lives. It's going to be a hot and RAPIDLY CHANGING market from 2008-2010. SSD capacity and speed increases, price drops, competition and demand will all work in consumer favor. Here we'll keep up on featuring the best price SSD's over time.

EEEK! SSD's ARE EXPENSIVE!

Perhaps. But mechanical disk drives have notorious failure rates. Many HDD's die in 1 or 3 years or become intolerably noisy. Having to replace one costs $100-200 bucks so factoring the cost of SSD Flash over a computer's lifetime may be offset. You could also put the value of the hard drive you replace with SSD to work into an external USB/FireWire/Combo case and still use it as a backup drive.