Solid State Drives

Solid State Drives: The Future of Data Storage?

an

®

Storage eBook

Contents…
Solid State Drives: The Future of Data Storage?
This content was adapted from Internet.com’s ServerWatch, CIO Update, Enterprise IT Planet, and Enterprise Storage Forum Web sites. Contributors: Kenneth Hess, Paul Rubens, Pam Baker, Herman Mehling, and Drew Robb.

2

2 4

SSDs, Coming Soon to a ServerNear You

Could Solid State Spell the End for Hard Drives?

4

6

6 9

SSDs, The Pros and Cons

SSD Makers Wrestle with Performance Degradation

9

12

12

SSDs Take Center Stage

Solid State Drives: The Future of Data Storage?

SSDs, Coming Soon to a Server Near You
By Kenneth Hess

S

olid state drives (SSDs), as compared to their spinning counterparts, have nomoving parts, require less power, have a smaller footprint, produce a fraction of the heat, enjoy a longer life span and perform better in some systems. That first sentence should have sold you — what else do you need to know? Oh, right, the downside. You’re right; it’s the price tag. They currently range in price from two or three times for smaller drives (about 30GB) to more than 10 times that fordrives in the 120GB to 250GB range. Don’t let the prices scare you away from SSDs. As the technology matures, the prices will drop significantly. When deciding on your next move in storage technology, keep in mind you don’t need a huge amount of disk space

to install an operating system. Hypervisors use about 4GB and full installations of Windows Server 2008 require that same 4GB. A $90 32GBSSD provides more than enough space for the operating system and any future patches, service packs, and related operating system support files.

Green Technology
At first glance at the prices, you might think that the “green” in this technology is the price, but it isn’t. It’s the technology behind the high price. Lowering the amount of heat produced by hundreds of disk drives adds up fast. Datacenters will run at near-normal office temperatures instead of the current frosty temperatures around which they now hover. Requiring less power from your utility company proves that this new technology saves money and not just in theory (see the table below). SATA vs. SSD (Watts) Drive Type SATA SSD Idle 8 0.08 Seek 10 0.15 Start-Up 20 ND*

*No Data for startup power consumption for SSDs.The table shows the average power consumption from a variety of different SATA and SCSI drives. The SSDs are Intel High Performance SSDs.

Performance
If you’ve heard of SSDs, you’ve also heard about their increased performance over conventional disk technology. Since SSDs don’t have moving parts, their seek times return numbers in the range of 75 microseconds to 1 millisecond. Standard disktechnology runs in the 4 to 5 millisecond range. 2
Back to Contents
Solid State Drives: The Future of Data Storage?, an Internet.com Storage eBook. © 2010, Internet.com, a division of QuinStreet, Inc.

Solid State Drives: The Future of Data Storage?

Having said that SSDs outperform their conventional counterparts in seek times, don’t install write-intensive applications on them. Leave theoperating system and perhaps a read-intensive application on a local disk but for heavy writes, use the same technologies that you do now: storage area network (SAN) or high-performance network attached storage (NAS).

How would your IT budget handle technology refreshes that exceed five years? Seven years? Longer? The case for SSD adoption is strong indeed. SSDs transcend the hype that’s oftenassociated with new technologies. Independent case studies show that SSDs create a new storage playing field and manufacturers suggest that conventional spinning disk technology is near its final breath. I predict within five years, SSDs will populate more than 90 percent of all server systems and NAS. By that time, technology will have caught up to the point where any application will feel right at...