SOLID STATE DRIVES: DONE WITH THE DJ
Ever been annoyed by the cranky noises heard from your computer or laptop when the surroundings are quiet? Even when you are surrounded by quietness, these noises are still heard, and that too monotonously. Well, thanks to your conventional hard drive, you will have a never-ending supply of these disturbances!
Well, this is not the main problem related to hard drives. Think that it does not play a major part in overall computer performance? Well, you are wrong. An up-gradation to newer technology, or a hybrid using old and new will work wonders, and I will explain why.
If you have understood the pun given in the title, then you probably know where my article is headed to — yes, you got it right: SSDs.
So, basically solid-state drive (SSD) is a new generation of storage device used in computers. SSDs replace traditional mechanical hard disks by using flash-based memory, which is significantly faster. Older hard-disk storage technologies run slower, which often makes your computer run slower than it should. SSDs speed up computers significantly due to their low read-accessing time and fast throughput (the amount of material or items passing through a system or process.)
To understand how SSDs work and why they’re so useful, we have to first understand how computer memory works. A computer’s memory architecture is broken down into three aspects:
1. The cache
2. The memory
3. The data drive
Each of these aspects serves an important function that determines how they operate.
Cache: The cache is the innermost memory unit. When running, your computer uses the cache as a sort of playground for data calculations and procedures. The electrical pathways to cache are short, making data access almost instantaneous. However, cache is very small so its data is constantly being overwritten.
RAM: This is where your computer stores data related to the programs and processes that are actively running. Access to RAM is slower than access to the cache, but only negligibly so. But still, that does make a difference, so while choosing a laptop, do go for the one with higher cache memory.
Data Drive: The data drive is where everything else is stored for permanence. It is the place where all your programs, configuration files, documents, music files, movie files, and everything else is kept. When you want to access a file or run a program, the computer needs to load it from the data drive and into RAM.
The important thing to know is that there is a vast speed difference between the three. While cache and RAM operate at speeds in nanoseconds, a traditional hard disk drive operates at speeds in milliseconds.
In essence, the data drive is the bottleneck: no matter how fast everything else is, a computer can only load and save data as fast as the data drive can handle it.
This is where SSDs come in. While traditional HDDs are slow, SSDs are much faster. This can significantly reduce the amount of time it takes to load various programs and processes and will make your computer much faster.
How Do Solid-State Drives Work?
If you took apart a typical HDD, you would see a stack of magnetic plates with a reading needle — kind of like a vinyl record player. Before the needle can read or write data, the plates have to spin around to the right location.
On the other hand, SSDs use a grid of electrical cells to quickly send and receive data. These grids are separated into sections called “pages,” and these pages are where data is stored. Pages are clumped together to form “blocks.”
SSDs are called “solid-state” because they have no moving parts, again a reference to the pun, and hence no annoying noises.
‘No moving parts’ also implies that there is no friction, and hence lower maintenance required, and also lesser space is taken considering both axes.
HISTORY
Early experiments with SSD-like technology started in the 1950s, and by the 1970s and 1980s, they were being used in high-end supercomputers. However, the technology was extremely expensive, and the storage capacity was small (2MB-20MBs). SSD technology was used occasionally in the military and aerospace sectors, but it wouldn’t be used in consumer devices until the 1990s.
In the early 1990s, hardware innovations caused SSD prices to drop. However, the lifespan and size was still an issue at the time: An SSD had a lifespan of roughly 10 years. It wouldn’t be until the late 2000s that SSDs would start to become more reliable and provide decades of continuous usage at acceptable access speeds.
The memory chips on an SSD are comparable to random access memory (RAM). Instead of a magnetic platter, files are saved on a grid of NAND flash cells. Each grid (also called blocks) can store between 256 KB and 4MB. The controller of an SSD has the exact address of the blocks so that when your PC requests a file it is (almost) instantly available. There’s no waiting for a read/write head to find the information it needs. SSD access times are thus measured in nanoseconds.
SSDs have specific benefits in the following areas:
· Business: Companies working with huge amounts of data (such as programming environments or data analysis) often rely on SSDs, as access times and file-transfer speeds are critical. It is a costly option, but, honestly, a good investment.
· Gaming: Gaming computers have always pressed the limits of current computing technology, justifying relatively expensive equipment with the benefit of gaming performance. That is particularly true for storage, as modern blockbuster games constantly load and write files (e.g. textures, maps, levels, characters).The time taken for loading textures and overall mapping can be the deciding point of a competitive game, and hence SSD becomes a must.
· Mobility: SSDs have low power requirements, thus contributing to better battery life in laptops and tablets. SSDs are also shock resistant, which reduces the chances of data loss when mobile devices are dropped.
· Servers: Enterprise servers need SSDs to get quick read and write in order to properly serve their client PCs. Again, a fruitful investment.
A solid state drive with a SATA III connection should achieve around 550MB/s read and 520MB/s write speeds, though some will be faster — but will max out at 600MB/s.
So, even with a SATA III connection, which limits the speed of SSDs, you’re getting around four times the speed of traditional hard drives. However, if you use one of the better-optimized connections for SSDs, the speed difference really opens up.
Average speeds for PCIe/M.2 SSDs range from around 1.2GB/s up to around 1.4GB/s — and if you’ve got the budget there are even some that can reach 2.2GB/s.
Source : Techradar
TYPES OF SSDs:
· PCIe and NVMe SSDs: (PCI-Express) is normally used to connect graphics cards, network cards, or other high-performance peripherals. This interface gives you high bandwidth and low latency, making it ideal when you need blazing-fast communication between the SSD and your CPU/RAM. SSDs that use this connection type is based on the Nonvolatile Memory Express standard (NVMe), which offers higher input-output per second (IOPS) and even lower latency than SATA. NVMe boasts up to 16 GBits per second of raw throughput which, thanks to multiple parallel channels, runs at up to 4,000 MB per second.
· mSATA III, SATA III, and traditional SSDs: Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) is an older interface that was designed specifically for storage, with speeds up to 6 GBit/s or about 600 MB per second. SATA is slowly being phased out by NVME, which is significantly faster. However, older PCs or laptops with a hard disk drive would still benefit from an upgrade to a SATA-based SSD.
For a consumer, the most common options are SATA and M.2. SATA is known as the old two-connector system that hard drives used, including a SATA Power and SATA data cable. SATA-based SSDs are best for older computers that lack newer SSD connector types and have only SATA connections. A great way to boost the speed of an older computer with a spinning hard drive is to clone the drive to an SSD, and replace the Hard Drive with an SSD, increasing the computer’s ability to read/write data possibly by tenfold.
However, it should be noted that these SATA drives are capped at a maximum theoretical transfer speed of 600MB/s, whereas other un-bottlenecked SSDs have recently exceeded 3GB/s, nearly five times the SATA maximum. This means SATA-based SSDs cannot utilize the speed and efficiency of newer controllers such as NVMe.
Some of the reasons why SSD is the best upgrade possible:
Form factor:
Without any moving parts, SSDs are the thinnest of all available storage options. They’re especially good for thin and light PCs and more complicated, industrial designs. For standard notebooks, SSDs are available in 7 mm heights. HDDs are available in standard 7 mm and 15 mm designs.
Capacity:
Hard drives are workhorses when it comes to capacity. The storage size of hard drives is exponentially larger than solid-state drives, and current capacities for consumer hard drives — currently reaching up to 12 TB — are anticipated to continue growing. Solid-state hybrid drives also offer maximum capacity points at affordable prices while solid-state drives are only affordable at lower capacities. High-capacity SSDs continue to be expensive.
Speed:
SSDs provide peak performance for booting and high read/write performance for computing that requires enhanced multitasking capabilities. SSHDs can provide near-SSD performance when booting, launching and loading. HDDs usually provide ample performance for the majority of PC platforms available today.
Price:
Low-capacity SSDs can be affordable in the 250 GB to 500 GB range. But high-capacity SSDs are very expensive, especially when measured by cost per gigabyte. HDDs provide the lowest cost per gigabyte. SSHDs provide cost per gigabyte which is slightly higher than HDDs.
Battery Life:
Solid state drives are the most power-efficient. Solid state hybrid drives come in at a close second for power efficiency, since they frequently spin down more often than hard drives. In general, storage will not impact battery life on a laptop computer by more than about 10%. The processor power and LCD screen are most responsible for draining the battery.
Reliability:
Failure rates on SSD, HDD and SSHD technologies have very similar ratings. SSHDs use both flash and HDD portions more efficiently than if they were separate, so they are considered extremely reliable.
Durability:
Solid state drives are viewed as more durable due to their design. Without moving parts, they can withstand higher extremes of shock, drop and temperature.
Just like every coin has two sides, similarly along with the advantages, there are some disadvantages to this technology too:
· Flash memory can only sustain a finite number of writes before it dies.
There is a lot of science that goes into explaining why this happens but suffice it to say that as an SSD is used, the electrical charges within each of its data cells must be periodically reset. Unfortunately, the electrical resistance of each cell increases slightly with every reset, which increases the voltage necessary to write into that cell. Eventually, the required voltage becomes so high that the particular cell becomes impossible to write to.
· SSDs can only write to empty pages in a block. In HDDs, data can be written to any location on the plate at any time, and that means that data can be easily overwritten. SSDs can’t directly overwrite data in individual pages. They can only write data to empty pages in a block.
When enough pages in a block are marked as unused, the SSD commits the entire block’s worth of data to memory, erases the entire block, then re-commits the data from memory back to the block while leaving the unused pages blank. Note that erasing a block doesn’t necessarily mean the data is fully gone. This means that SSDs become slower over time.
But at the end of the day, speed and efficiency matter, and hence, in my honest opinion, an SSD upgrade is more meaningful than a RAM upgrade, and hence is the best possible thing you can gift yourself as well as the computer.
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