Will Solid-State-Drive (SSD) become the data storage technology of the future? In this article we are going to analyze the pros and cons of this promising technology, that is getting more and more widespread also among the end users.
The PROS
The main advantages (the "pros") of SSDs, compared to the traditional hard-disk drives, are the following:
- no moving electro-mechanical parts
- small dimensions
- they are noiseless
- low power consumption, and therefore less heat that needs to be dissipated
- they are "green" (eco-friendly) devices: SSD technology reduces infact the overall power consumption of hard-disks, servers, and laptops
- another key factor of SSDs are their performance: since they don't have any moving part, their seek time is considerably lower (much less than 1 ms, which corresponds to the worst case) with respect to the traditional hard-drives (5 ms or more)
- no moving parts, less power consumption and less heat to be dissipated lead directly to another adavantage of SSD technology: longer life expectancy. SSDs manufacturers say that the life expectancy of this data sotrage device is at least of 10-15 years (but the average value is actually higher), compared to the life expectancy of a conventional hard-drive (about 3 years). That is an important point: SSD provides a valuable technology to be used in servers and NAS, where the disk-drive failures have to avoided as much as possible. Also, SSDs can operate at a temperature of 70 degree Celsius or more, and are therefore more robust than conventional hard-disks
- SSDs are suitable for caching data: since they have a very low seek time on read operations,they can be used to access frequently asked memory contents
- SSD are built with MLC NAND technology. The early SSD devices were based on a Single Level Cell (SLC) NAND technology, which stored one bit of data for each memory cell. Today, SSD devices are using Multi Level Cell (MLC) technology, which can store two or more bits of data per cell, thus increasing the density storage and reducing the cost per capacity (MLC technology is also used in MP3 player and USB flash drives)
- compatibility with existing operating systems: this feature is provided directly by all SSD vendors