Solid State Drives have entered the market and are capturing market share not only in the desktop segment but also in the enterprise market. This is true especially in data centers where access latencies, reliability and power consumption easily offset the initial cost overhead.
The predominant SSD storage medium at this moment is NAND flash memory and this is not likely to change in the near future even though new technologies such as phase change memory, magnetoresistive memory, resistive memory, organic memory, nanotube-based memory and finally NOR flash are on the horizon. NAND flash memory has some peculiarities; some of them are making it the media of choice in the current technology landscape, others, though, are posing some severe limitations with respect to the applicability of NAND flash as a drop-in replacement for rotatable media, at least for those unaware of the possible pitfalls.
In the first installment of this series, we'll take another technology deep dive into NAND technology and in the following articles apply the insights into the NAND idiosyncrasies to Solid State Drive management in order to optimize performance, minimize wear, and most importantly, maintain performance over the live of an ageing drive.
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