Abstract
Solid-state drives (SSD) represents the state of the art of mass storage solutions. They can be looked at as the evolution of Hard Disks which eventually “lost” the mechanical arm moving onto a rotating magnetic disk in favor of using solid-state nonvolatile memory chips to store data. This simple difference makes an SSD the preferred choice if read/write access time, power consumption and dimensions are the key requirements of the application. Cost and endurance are instead the reasons why traditional Hard Disks still survive in specific areas. The chapter starts with an historical evolution of the Hard Disk and moves then on its main features and parameters. Interface communication protocol is presented in more detail, being it inherited as it is by the SSDs. A glance on the Internal SSD HW and FW architecture is given with a particular focus on FTL (Flash Translation Layer) which assumes the use of NAND flash as NVM memory. Finally a brief analysis of market-segment coverage possibilities of SSD is presented.
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Notes
- 1.
DRAM – Dynamic Random Access Memory is used to store volatile information on computers. DRAM is made up of many cells and each cell is referred to as a bit. A cell contains a capacitor and a transistor. Since computer machine language is made up of 1 s and 0 s, it has the value of 1 when active and 0 when inactive.
SDRAM or Synchronous Random Access Memory is the result of DRAM evolution. This type of memory synchronizes the input and output signals with the system board. Its speed ratings are in MHz. SDRAM transmits every clock count at a specific time.
DDR RAM (or Double Data Rate Random Access Memory) transmits twice every clock count. This makes DDR RAM twice as fast as SDRAM.
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© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Iaculo, M., Falanga, F., Vitale, O. (2011). Introduction to SSD. In: Campardo, G., Tiziani, F., Iaculo, M. (eds) Memory Mass Storage. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-14752-4_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-14752-4_5
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