Brown is the SSD business development manager of Intel’s Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) Solutions Group. He advises leading IT decision makers on best practices around storage technologies. He served as SSD product line manager and is accredited with the development of multiple products and holds nine U.S. patents on NVM technology. Network World | Jan 23, 2015http://www.infoworld.com/article/2874377/infrastructure-storage/debunking-ssd-myths.html
The author doesn't get into how the "hardware-based AES 256-bit encryption" in the SSD gets interfaced with the computer and OS. From what I've read, I get that the most (arguably the only) secure method involves various closed-source Windows apps. And there's no way to independently verify the security of closed-source apps. Also, there's no implementation (open- or closed-source) for Linux
Very reassuring to read about "Myth 4: SSDs lack endurance". From the article: "And since SSDs contain billions of cells, we’re talking about an enormous amount of data that can be written and deleted at every moment of every day of the drive’s life. For example, one 100GB SSD that offers 10 drive writes per day can support 1TB (terabyte) of writing each and every single day, 365 days a year for five years."
Reading about the guts, I was very impressed to discover that SSDs rely on very sophisticated RAID setups, and can survive loss of major chunks of flash. Also, I recommend using SSDs with onboard capacitor-based UPS to guarantee writes. Enterprise SSDs have them. Crucial M500 and M550 do as well. Maybe someone knows which other consumer SSDs do.
I like SSD and use one myself in my laptop top, it was a luxury, but this article is not giving a balanced picture IMHO. 1. Unless you are I/O bound (most people are not) the real-world performance increases are not that huge for the cost. For example my laptop boots up 10 times faster, things load faster, but the time saved per day is only minutes, that is only a small performance gain day to day, sticking extra RAM in will mitigate the performance difference somewhat AND help OS/application performance too. There are specialised cases where SSD performance is valuable though. In an enterprise setting they are still far too costly and 10K raided drives with large cache on the controllers are fast, cheaper and offer better reliability. There are a lot of SSD on the market RAid In addition there are a lot of cheap SSD where you can't disable write caches, which is needed when using caching RAID controllers. Completely ignores that storage is about space as well as speed, we have 1PB of actual storage, hundreds of HDD, they need to be paired up for RAID, using SSD is not going to cut down on the number of drives we need. 2. Completely ignores the loads of ongoing issues people get like with all the Sandybridge drives or the recent Samsung EVO performances issues, there are far more occurances of widespread probems with SSD than there are with HDDs. SSD need 5 more years to mature to be considered reliable. 3. Tech report test shows this is not true for all drives, many struggle to hit 1PB without error so in the given example would be erroring/failing by 3 years. Cheers, Nick
@ NGRhodes I think SSD's are perhaps not ready yet for a corparate environment, but for normal home usage they are probably already good enough. I would never go back to HDD's.
