SSDs are highly used in one or many forms to ease storage of data for future use in various industries. They deliver efficient performance with flexible storage options to make things easier.
An SSD (solid-state drive or solid-state disk) is a highly efficient nonvolatile storage device that stores persistent data. Solid state drives are not hard drives in the traditional sense of terms. There is no moving part involved unlike the traditional hard disk drive which features a spinning disk with the read/head on the mechanical arm. On the other hand, SSD has an array of semiconductor memory organized as disk drive using integrated circuits rather than magnetic or optical storage media.
Various industries rely on the use of a variety of SSDs like SATA or PATA SSD and thus the development and adoption of the drives has been influenced by a rapidly expanding need for higher input/output performances. These are ideal for both heavy read and random workloads as they feature much lower random access and read access latency than HDDs. The capability of flash SSD to read data directly and immediately from a specific flash SSD cell location makes lower latency possible. The solid state drive technology has many advantages to offer to industries which use high performance servers, desktops, laptops or any other application that needs to deliver information in real-time or near real time. Storage space is never a problem as one can have 80GB SSD or even more for storing as much data as required.
The form factors
There have been identified three major SSD form factors for the enterprise:
€ There are solid state cards which use standard card form factors also known as Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe), and stay on a printed circuit board or PCB.
€ There are SSDs that are available in traditional HDD form factors and fit into the same slots.
€ As the third form factor, one may have solid-state modules or in short SSMs existing in Dual In-line Memory Module (DIMM) or it may also exist in small outline dual in-line memory module (SO-DIMM). It may work on a standard HDD interface like Serial Advanced Technology Attachment, or in short SATA.
Performance
As already known, there is now available Rugged SSD which delivers faster performance even greater than highest performance electromechanical disk drives. In these drives, latency and seek time are also considerably reduced and end users can enjoy much faster boot times. On the general note, it can even be said that the SSDs are more durable and much quieter than HDDs as they don't have any moving part to break or spin up/down. Furthermore, they have a set life expectancy as they enjoy a finite number of write cycles before delivering erratic performances. However, it may not be termed as a disadvantage per se, as HDDs too degrade and fail over time. On the other hand, SDDs can have wear leveling to increase drive lifespan. To manage the wear leveling, there is flash controller, which is based on an algorithm to arrange data in order to ensure write or erase cycles are distributed evenly among all the blocks in the device.
For the efficient performance, there is also Industrial CF Card to help professionals make better use of the technology.