21 Facts About SSDs

SSDs based on NAND Flash will slowly leak charge over time if left for long periods without power.

SSDs have a limited lifetime number of writes, and slow down as they reach their full storage capacity.

Micron and Intel initially made faster SSDs by implementing data striping and interleaving in their architecture.

Flash memory SSDs were initially slower than DRAM solutions, and some early designs were even slower than HDDs after continued use.

Some SSDs, called NVDIMM or Hyper DIMM devices, use both DRAM and flash memory.

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Form factors which were more common to memory modules are now being used by SSDs to take advantage of their flexibility in laying out the components.

Some SSDs are based on the PCIe form factor and connect both the data interface and power through the PCIe connector to the host.

The main benefits of BGA SSDs are their low power consumption, small chip package size to fit into compact subsystems, and that they can be soldered directly onto a system motherboard to reduce adverse effects from vibration and shock.

Some field failure rates indicate that SSDs are significantly more reliable than HDDs but others do not.

However, SSDs are uniquely sensitive to sudden power interruption, resulting in aborted writes or even cases of the complete loss of the drive.

SSDs based on DRAM do not have a limited number of writes.

Many SSDs critically fail on power outages; a December 2013 survey of many SSDs found that only some of them are able to survive multiple power outages.

However, SSDs have undergone many revisions that have made them more reliable and long lasting.

SSDs were originally designed for use in a computer system.

Later SSDs became smaller and more compact, eventually developing their own unique form factors such as the M 2 form factor.

SSDs have very different failure modes from traditional magnetic hard drives.

The authors concluded that SSDs fail at a significantly lower rate than hard disk drives.

Since flash memory has become a common component of SSDs, the falling prices and increased densities have made it more cost-effective for many other applications.

For instance, in the distributed computing environment, SSDs can be used as the building block for a distributed cache layer that temporarily absorbs the large volume of user requests to the slower HDD based backend storage system.

SSDs based on an SD card with a live SD operating system are easily write-locked.

Performance of flash-based SSDs is difficult to benchmark because of the wide range of possible conditions.