When is the solid state drive spring?

Speaking of solid-state drives, there has been a constant controversy since 1978 when there are solid products. It was predicted in 2009 that solid-state drives would not have a future. Solid-State hard drive in the eyes of the people questioned all the way stumbled to today, its own vitality is still very strong.

SSD (Solid State DRIVE,SSD) is made up of control unit and Memory Unit (flash chip), which is simply a hard disk made of solid-state electronic memory chip array, the interface specification and definition, function and usage of solid-state hard disk are the same as that of ordinary hard disk, In the product shape and size is also consistent with the normal hard drive.

Compared to traditional disks, solid-state drives discard traditional tracks and electromechanical devices used to drive and search for these disk tracks, and read and write directly in large, dense memory chips. The mechanical delay, latency of track search time and the movement of data on disk do not exist. This allows solid-state drives to provide higher IOPS (input/output operations per second) than normal disks. This is the biggest advantage of solid-state drives and, as a result, solid-state drives have been incorporated into the overall storage solution by many storage vendors.

In addition, the power consumption of solid-state drives is more reasonable. Because of the need to drive the spindle motor and the head maglev system, the power consumption per IOPS is reduced. Solid-State drives are greener than traditional disks. At the same time, solid-state hard disk seismic effect is better, the operating temperature range is larger than the traditional disk.

Many enterprises have fully enjoyed the high efficiency of solid-state drives, specifically, solid-state storage is mainly used in the following scenarios:

Database acceleration

Loading database indexes on SSD or more appropriate host flash memory, or even the entire database, can significantly improve the speed of data access.

Cache tiering

Increasing SSD as a caching hierarchy accelerates data access and places the most frequently used information on the cache hierarchy, much like other caching applications.

Boot peak problem

Loading a VDI image on a solid state store solves the "boot peak problem" that occurs when a large number of users start at the same time.

Local Data and mixed cloud

The provision of frequently accessed data to cache storage that is closer to the user, which accelerates data access and lowers the load on a centralized SAN network.

All-solid-state hard disk storage infrastructure

For applications that require very high I/O access, the solid-state hard disk storage infrastructure meets their performance requirements and lowers the cost of power consumption and refrigeration by up to 80% per cent of the traditional 15,000 rpm drives.

It can be said that storage managers use the high speed of solid-state drives to solve many I/O problems.

But solid-state drives have many flaws that have not been resolved, which is why many companies choose carefully.

The first is the cost. Solid-state drives cost about 10 times times more per gigabyte than traditional hard drives. This is a challenge to the enterprise's up-front procurement budget. But the cost will gradually decline with the technical level, when the SSD cost per gigabyte is three to four times times the traditional hard drive will be very competitive. And someone has taken another look at the account, which is that solid-state storage, while much higher than a normal hard disk per gigabyte cost, is cheaper in real unit I/O costs, which is what storage managers should consider.

The write limit of solid-state hard disk based on Flash is usually below 100,000 times, which is a fatal shortcoming. But the special flash drive can reach 2 million to 5 million write limits, solid state drive life will be greatly improved.

The disadvantage of estimating that the storage Manager is more daunting is that the SSD's data cannot be recovered once the hardware damage occurs. If a traditional disk or tape damage occurs, its data can be recovered in part. But once the chips of a solid-state drive are damaged, it is almost impossible to retrieve data from a chip that breaks into several lobes or is penetrated by the current.

Gartner has predicted that the global SSD market will exceed $6 billion trillion by 2011. Many storage vendors, such as Dell Compellent, EMC, and HDS, are seizing market opportunities to support solid-state drive applications in their storage architectures. But for storage managers, it takes a lot of evaluation to decide whether to use a solid-state drive or not.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)