SSD trends

SSD (Solid State Disk) companies have released promising news about the new units for this year and their future prospects until 2017, as well as prices that are closer to conventional HDs.

It all started when SanDisk reported 4TB, 8TB and 16TB capacity disks, and in 2017 they report that prices will be 25% of current values, coming closer to the cost of mechanical hard drives.

For you who stopped in time and don't know what I'm talking about, keep reading and I will quickly explain the big difference and benefits of an SSD in terms of performance on a computer.

All the most common disks to date on all computers are mechanical hard disks, consisting of a disk with numerous iron filaments attached to a layer of disk and its read / write arm with a magnetic electrode that as energized retrieves or writes information in the iron filaments in a magnetic way.

The capacity of the data on the disks is due to the fact that they are extremely compacted in small areas, and the struggle of the manufacturers is to increasingly reduce the physical space to store more terabytes per mm².

Western Digital 4.0 TB Hard Drive (Mechanical)

However the limits of physical size and the limits of physics reach the point where reducing a physical space a lot, the quality of keeping data safe can also be jeopardized.

Western Digital sacrificed part of its ECC (Data Bit Parity Area for Correcting Errors) of data to increase the capacity of various hard drive models, in order to compete concurrently with other manufacturers' disks at a lower cost.

Despite apparently having a higher risk of losing data with a smaller ECC area, WDC proved in tests that its disks use the ECC area at a much lower frequency than competitors' disks.

SanDisk comparison for the future of SSD drives through 2017.

The main difference of the SSD is that it does not have iron filaments, nor read / write arms, all data is physically in the same place and can be accessed at random through integrated memory circuits, that is, there are no moving parts .

In fact, inside each data chip, there are electron cells, where the energy passes and the cells are able to hold electrons or not, and so the data is recorded.

You must have a thumb drive at home, and ask yourself: Is this what's inside the SSD drives? Yes, exactly, but with some changes.

The SSD works with an additional controller chip for all other memory chips, and makes the synchronous distribution of data between all chips, so a saved file is in fact always spread across all chips, and it reads in the same way .

In contrast to conventional HD, sequential data performs better, in SSDs there is no sequential data. All of them will always be spread across all chips, and the controller chip is responsible for determining the sequencing of the information.

This would be like using 10 pen-drivers in RAID-0 with a transfer rate of 30 MB / s each, the total speed reached will be 300 MB / s.

Hard Disk on the left and Solid State Disk on the right.

The SSD gained great performance with this feature, after all it uses a "slow" chip, but using a technology known for a long time, and shipping and soldering on the same board, made it a success in terms of performance and energy savings.

Hybrid disk with promise to be faster, avoid heat and air resistance using helium gas.

The life of mechanical hard drives with this recent new news can be shaken, as physical limits have already caused HD companies to start making hybrid drives, part SSD and part HD, or even helium gas disk technologies internally to increase internal discs and decrease air resistance.

With the new high-capacity discs in solid state, you will gain in performance, durability and also in storage capacity.

It is worth mentioning that: an electron cell does not keep electrons there forever. The controller chip is responsible for checking the health of cells according to their free time and recharging them with more electrons; even so it is not yet possible to compare it to the mechanical HD, which in turn also has damaged sectors and are replaced by sectors at the end of the disk in a way that is transparent to the user.

Query references:

SanDisk Unveils World's First 4 Terabyte Enterprise SAS SSD, <http://www.sandisk.com.br/about-sandisk/press-room/press-releases/2014/sandisk-unveils-worlds-first-4tb-enterprise-sas -ssd />, accessed on 03/03/2015.

4TB of Capacity for Scalability and Faster Business Time-to-Results, <http://www.sandisk.com/enterprise/sas-ssd/optimus-max-ssd/>, accessed 03/03/2015.