Storage: Enterprises Increasingly Adopt FLASH-based SSDs as Price Point Drops

Solid state drives (SSDs) are increasingly being used by large enterprises.   These drives are called ‘solid state’ because they use semiconductors, typically Flash memory, rather than magnetic media which is used in standard mechanical hard drives.  The advantages of  SSD over mechanical hard drive technology include:

• Consumes less power
• Enables faster data access
• More Reliable than mechanical hard drives

Solid-state drives (SSD) are fast, and can clock performance speeds that come in at ten to one hundred times faster than the fastest mechanical drives.  Because of the advantages of SSD, particularly their great performance, large enterprises have begun using SSDs for storing their most critical production data.  SSD storage is typically referred to as tier zero storage because it outclasses event the fastest tier one mechanical storage devices.  Tier zero storage is used by applications that have many write i/o transactions, and is used primarily in financial, video editing and retail industries.

Compared to traditional block i/o mechanical disk drive technology, solid-state drive technology to date has been prohibitively expensive.  But that price gap looks like it is beginning to significantly narrow  It’s likely that as the cost of SSD-based drives will continue to drop and that SSD drives will make up an ever increasing percentage of enterprise storage.

Start-up storage companies with low-cost SSD storage offerings are beginning to appear.  Pure Storage, for example, now offers an SSD drive that claims to be less costly per Gigabyte than a mechanical drive equivalent.  Other companies pursuing the SSD market include Violin Memory and Numbus Data Systems.

Despite the hype around SSDs, some have challenged the reliability benefits of the technology.  SSDs have a reputation for lower failure rates than mechanical disks, but the advantage of SSDs over mechanical may not be as great as many suggest.  While the platters, heads, bearings and motors of mechanical drives can be points of failure in mechanical drives, both SSDs and mechanical drives share a number of electrical components in common that are responsible for many hard drive failures, suggesting that failure rates in SSDs may actually be very similar to those of mechanical drives.

Further, SSD users are reporting drive failures.  A survey by Data Recovery company, Kroll Ontrack, found that 57 percent of companies using SSDs have reported at least one data loss incident.  Troy Hegr, Kroll Ontrack Data Recovery technology manager, said that “System area corruption accounts for 60 per cent of SSD/Flash data loss, but physical damage, file system corruption, electronics failure and human error are also factors.”