Why SSDs are superior to conventional HDDs
Solid State Drives, SSDs, offer several advantages over conventional hard drives in industrial applications like edge computing or machine control. The key take-aways are:- higher performance, especially when it comes to random access.
- SSDs do not have any moving parts limiting their resistance to shock and vibrations.
- easier to design for a wide temperature range prevalent in fanless industrial systems.
Hard disc drives have been a known quantity for decades, were well understood and could be chosen for the desired application by choosing from just a hand full of clear characteristics: Capacity, seek time, RPM and, for critical applications, error rate. Solid State drives have a couple more nuanced features to consider and finding the right type of SSD has become a more complex undertaking. Edge gateways have different requirements than edge computing, machine control has different ones from system capturing large amounts of data. And even among those the kind of data matters, as write amplification depends on how large each write access is. The SSD market has a myriad of different technologies to choose from, so how do you choose the right type of SSD?
More topics
- A brief overview of SSD Flash technology
- SLC Flash
- MLC Flash
- iSLC Flash
- 3D-TLC Flash
- QLC Flash
- PLC Flash
- How Controller and Firmware of the SSD increase the lifetime
- Dynamic Wear Leveling
- Static Wear Leveling
- Write amplification and SSDs
- Drive Writes Per Day (DWPD)
- How to find the sweet spot for your application
