Solid-state Drives Ready for Prime Time
Some questions are answered about the Future of Solid State Drivers from Don Barnetson, Samsung’s director of flash marketing, but in my opinion I would rather see how the longevity of these drivers before spending the case for one. Albeit the speed is a great bonus for all those hardware junkies out there, but the price can be a deal breaker for some
Obviously, write-errors are a huge concern for those who have used flash products in the past. Only a few years ago the highest-end flash media was only useable for 1,000 or so writes. At that point the physical bits would “burnout” and could no longer be flipped. Today’s single-level cell (SLC, memory that stores one bit per cell) is rated in excess of 100,000 writes before burnout. Multi-level cell flash, memory that stores multiple bits per cell, is significantly cheaper but even then is still rated at over 10,000 writes before burnout.
Is 10,000 writes enough? Absolutely, assures Barnetson. Samsung memory uses a technique called “wear leveling” to distribute the writes on a media through as many groups of cells as possible. The idea behind wear leveling is that all of the cells have approximately the same amount of writes to them, maximizing the life of the device. Consider a typical computer that writes 120 megabytes per hour to the hard drive. On a 32GB solid-state NAND drive, wear leveling would distribute this data over the entire drive — it would take 267 hours to fill the device once. Even on a multi-cell flash device, at this rate it would take no less than 150 years to burnout all the bits on the SSD. Single-cell drives are capable of ten times as many writes.
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