The proper care and feeding of SSD storage

May 17, 2013

Your solid-state drive sits there in silence. It’s sleek. Elegant. More than a little mysterious. The hard drive it replaced was easy to understand: A soft hum assured you that its platters were spinning. A quiet mechanical click informed you of its read/write operations. You’d groom it with the occasional defrag. Times were good. Now? Everything seems peaceful. But you keep hearing stories: An SSD’s performance deteriorates over time. They have disturbingly short life spans. If it fails, your precious data will be consigned to oblivion. Facts? Or fever-brained fiction? A high-end SSD is the pinnacle of computer storage today. Ditching your hard drive for one of the latest SSD models is like dumping your go-kart and hopping into a Formula One car. I’m not exaggerating: SSDs can produce a four- or fivefold jump in speed. They have no mechanical parts to break, and they emit zero noise. SSDs are the perfect storage medium—until things go pear-shaped. Or until you seek hard information about the technologies involved. A speedy drive with a few deep secrets One reason you hear so much fuzzy information about SSDs is that the companies that design and build one of the key components—the memory controller—guard their technology secrets more carefully than Coca-Cola protects its soda formula. It's a very competitive and lucrative market, with just a few players. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2038511/the-care-and-feeding-of-ssds-what-makes-these-speedy-drives-hum.html#tk.rss_howto