Storage

Samsung Touts Reliability of Solid-State Drives

The company claims that they are safe and reliable

By Bogdan Botezatu, Hardware Editor

25th of February 2008, 07:54 GMT

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SSDs are widely adopted in the storage business

Solid-state drives seem to become extremely popular especially with notebook users, despite the fact that they are expensive and limited in write cycles. Leaving the price aside, the NAND flash can be written to for

a limited number of times, ranging from 10,000 (for multi-level cell flash) and 100,000 (for single-level cell devices).

Samsung seems not to be concerned with the data stored on flash-based devices and defends the new media's reliability citing the popularity NAND-based SSDs enjoys in the server and enterprise market. Solid-state drives are made of NAND flash chips, and do not have any moving parts inside them. On the other side, hard-disk drives are using reading/writing heads that move across the spinning platters.

Solid-state drives are harder to kill than HDDs, as there is no risk of mechanical failure that usually occurs when the HDD is strongly shaken or dropped from even a small distance. However, the user has to pay quite a price to enjoy the luxury of the new storage media. Moreover, the disk is alleged to wear out in time, and the process cannot currently be stopped, although it can be delayed using uniform data distribution technologies.

Still, Michael Yang, flash marketing manager at Samsung claims that the reality is not as gloomy as seen on paper. "A flash device that is rated at 100,000 write cycles and it can write 100,000 times to every single (memory) cell within the device," Yang said. This is possible thanks to the wear-leveling technologies that distribute data across the memory cells on the flash in order to prevent some portions of the disk from wearing out more than the whole disk is. Young says that the leveling technology is built in the solid-state drive's controller.

Yang also stated that the increased demand in enterprise server parts have taken Samsung by surprise, although it was obvious that SSDs will witness fast adoption. SSDs are way faster than the HDD counterparts and there are enterprise customers that consider the speed factor as a critical aspect. "HDDs do 120 to 150 IOPS. SSDs 10,000 to 30,000 IOPS," said Young.

Samsung will bring a new model of 128GB SSD based on MLC (multi-level cell), but it will come with larger devices, such as the 250GB drive that is possible to kick in by the end of the year.

TAGS:

Samsung | Solid-stae drives | storage | HDD

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