The actual life of SSD storage manufacturers

With the substantial increase in capacity and the decrease in price, the application of flash memory has become more and more, and there is even a trend to replace hard disk storage manufacturers. However, flash memory hard disks have a big drawback, that is, the lifespan will be greatly reduced under the condition of frequent erasing and writing. Solid state drives are generally made of NAND flash memory, and the number of reads and writes can reach 2 million. If we use it every day and the number of reads and writes is 100 times, the service life can reach more than 60 years. But in fact, when we use solid state drives every day The number of reads and writes can only reach 10 times at most. In theory, the service life of a solid state drive can reach 600 years, which is more than 200 times that of a traditional robotic hard drive. Solid-state hard drives are basically similar in principle to our application of ordinary mechanical hard drives, such as analog sectors, analog tracks, and so on. Inside the solid state drive, the core part is the controller, which is the core of the entire solid state drive, which includes many architectures, such as read and write algorithms, interface definitions, and so on. The main impact on the life span is the number of reads and writes. In the definition of the algorithm of the solid-state drive, only one modification is counted as a real read and write.

Because Flash has the characteristics of limited erasing times and erasing first and then writing, it will bring the defects of limited service life. In order to extend its expected service life, wear leveling algorithms are generally used to manage each storage unit. The core of the balance algorithm writes new data into the least used physical block during each write operation to achieve the balance of the entire solid-state hard disk storage medium, especially the optimization of the algorithm in the garbage collection strategy and the static file management method , Can greatly improve the life of the entire solid state drive, improve the efficiency of writing data on the premise of observing the principle of wear leveling during garbage collection, and at the same time enhance the algorithm's ability to manage different types of file storage units, so as to achieve more effective wear leveling. In addition, some manufacturers have begun to imitate traditional hard disks and use RAM (memory media) as a form of caching. Due to the characteristics of RAM itself, the life of the entire electronic disk can be increased.

At present, the BladeCenter HS21 XM blade server provides solid state drives (SSD) based on flash memory technology. Compared with traditional mechanical hard drives, solid state drives are faster, more reliable, have better energy efficiency, and generate less heat. It has the advantages of being quieter, and that the solid-state drive on the blade server can run the operating system and any other applications. It also shows that the longevity is no longer a concern for us.

Generally, solid state drives are not mechanical, so the structure is relatively simple, the weight is relatively light, and there are no complicated accessories. It can be used in various environments such as high temperature, low temperature, vibration, shock, etc., and it is also the main component of increasing the lifespan. Different chips are also a factor that affects life. Due to different market needs, solid state drives are also artificially divided into commercial-grade solid-state drives (personal consumption), industrial-grade solid-state drives (industrial applications), and military-grade (military-industrial applications). The same goes for sex.

With the continuous increase in the number of erasing and writing of Flash chips, the lifespan is also improving. According to some current applications, the lifespan of a disk can reach more than 6 years, and the algorithm of the controller is also constantly improving, and the lifespan is also From another aspect, it has improved in disguise, and I believe that the life expectancy will be greatly improved in the future.