What does ssd do

Plus, they use less energy, saving battery life. Installing an SSD is one of the easiest ways to transform almost every aspect of your system's performance, making slow load times a thing of the past. Find out more about the benefits of solid state drives. Solid state drives are defined by three form factors; these are: the size of the drive, the type of connection interface, and the physical space the drive will occupy in the computer. The standard form factor for an SSD is 2. Since every write slightly degrades individual NAND cells, write amplification is a primary cause of wear.

Good news is SSD drive level endurance is always specified while keeping the worst case random write patterns in mind. However, with SSDs, you get much more work done per server which results in fewer devices deployed to get the same output as an HDD. The result? Reliability is defined as whether data is stored as intended, in an uncorrupted state. SSDs commonly use less power and result in longer battery life because data access is much faster and the device is idle more often.

Almost as well understood is the reliability advantage of SSDs. Given these intrinsic advantages, SSDs do not need replication for performance, and they generally require much less replication for reliability. Data reduction is the ratio of host data stored to physical storage required; a 50 percent ratio would be equivalent to a data-reduction ratio.

Because data reduction allows the user to store more data than is on the physical hardware, the resulting effective capacity is increased. Modern algorithms are optimized for SSDs, taking advantage of their performance to enable a high data-reduction ratio DRR while delivering high application performance. Learn more. Performance varies by use, configuration and other factors. Learn more at www.

Performance results are based on testing as of dates shown in configurations and may not reflect all publicly available updates. See backup for configuration details. The entire grid layout is referred to as a block, while the individual rows that make up the grid are called a page.

Common page sizes are 2K, 4K, 8K, or 16K, with to pages per block. Block size therefore typically varies between KB and 4MB. One advantage of this system should be immediately obvious.

The following chart shows the access latency for typical storage mediums given in microseconds. Image by CodeCapsule. While write latencies are significantly slower for NAND flash than read latencies, they still outstrip traditional spinning media. There are two things to notice in the above chart.

Erase latencies are also significantly impacted. This is also true for QLC drives, which store even more bits at varying voltage levels within the same cell. Reading the proper value out of the cell requires the memory controller to use a precise voltage to ascertain whether any particular cell is charged. One of the functional limitations of SSDs is while they can read and write data very quickly to an empty drive , overwriting data is much slower.

This is because while SSDs read data at the page level meaning from individual rows within the NAND memory grid and can write at the page level, assuming surrounding cells are empty, they can only erase data at the block level. This is because the act of erasing NAND flash requires a high amount of voltage.

While you can theoretically erase NAND at the page level, the amount of voltage required stresses the individual cells around the cells that are being re-written. Erasing data at the block level helps mitigate this problem. The following image steps through the garbage collection process. Block size can vary, but each row that makes up the grid is called a page.

Updating data is more complex for SSDs. All the data in a block must be refreshed when any portion of it is updated. The data on the old block is copied to a different block, the block is erased, and the data is rewritten with the changes to a new block. Each time you ask your computer to retrieve or update data, the SSD controller looks at the address of the data requested and reads the charge status.

When the drive is idle, a process called garbage collection goes through and makes sure the information in the old block is erased and that the block is free to be written to again. Because there are a finite number of times any block can be rewritten, this is an important process that prevents premature wear on the storage drive.

This process is called wear leveling and happens automatically as the drive is working. This allows room for the drive to move and delete items without affecting the overall storage capacity.

Although they are catching up, it can be harder to find large-capacity solid state drives. HDDs can be as much as 2. Why choose a solid state drive?

SSDs deliver faster load times for games, applications, and movies. Because of the technology they use, SSDs are lighter and better able to withstand movement and droppage.

In addition, solid state drives use less energy, allowing computers to run cooler. Compare Crucial solid state drives.