Solid State Drives: The Future of Data Storage?

an

Storage eBook

Contents
Solid State Drives: The Future of Data Storage?
This content was adapted from Internet.coms ServerWatch, CIO Update, Enterprise IT Planet, and Enterprise Storage Forum Web sites. Contributors: Kenneth Hess, Paul Rubens, Pam Baker, Herman Mehling, and Drew Robb.

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SSDs, Coming Soon to a Server Near You

Could Solid State Spell the End for Hard Drives?

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SSDs, The Pros and Cons

SSD Makers Wrestle with Performance Degradation

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SSDs Take Center Stage

Solid State Drives: The Future of Data Storage?

SSDs, Coming Soon to a Server Near You

By Kenneth Hess

olid state drives (SSDs), as compared to their spinning counterparts, have no moving parts, require less power, have a smaller footprint, produce a fraction of the heat, enjoy a longer life span and perform better in some systems. That first sentence should have sold you what else do you need to know? Oh, right, the downside. Youre right; its the price tag. They currently range in price from two or three times for smaller drives (about 30GB) to more than 10 times that for drives in the 120GB to 250GB range. Dont let the prices scare you away from SSDs. As the technology matures, the prices will drop significantly. When deciding on your next move in storage technology, keep in mind you dont need a huge amount of disk space

to install an operating system. Hypervisors use about 4GB and full installations of Windows Server 2008 require that same 4GB. A $90 32GB SSD provides more than enough space for the operating system and any future patches, service packs, and related operating system support files.

Green Technology
At first glance at the prices, you might think that the green in this technology is the price, but it isnt. Its the technology behind the high price. Lowering the amount of heat produced by hundreds of disk drives adds up fast. Data centers will run at near-normal office temperatures instead of the current frosty temperatures around which they now hover. Requiring less power from your utility company proves that this new technology saves money and not just in theory (see the table below). SATA vs. SSD (Watts) Drive Type SATA SSD Idle 8 0.08 Seek 10 0.15 Start-Up 20 ND*

*No Data for startup power consumption for SSDs.

The table shows the average power consumption from a variety of different SATA and SCSI drives. The SSDs are Intel High Performance SSDs.

Performance
If youve heard of SSDs, youve also heard about their increased performance over conventional disk technology. Since SSDs dont have moving parts, their seek times return numbers in the range of 75 microseconds to 1 millisecond. Standard disk technology runs in the 4 to 5 millisecond range. 2
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Solid State Drives: The Future of Data Storage?, an Internet.com Storage eBook. 2010, Internet.com, a division of QuinStreet, Inc.

Solid State Drives: The Future of Data Storage?

Having said that SSDs outperform their conventional counterparts in seek times, dont install write-intensive applications on them. Leave the operating system and perhaps a read-intensive application on a local disk but for heavy writes, use the same technologies that you do now: storage area network (SAN) or high-performance network attached storage (NAS).

How would your IT budget handle technology refreshes that exceed five years? Seven years? Longer? The case for SSD adoption is strong indeed. SSDs transcend the hype thats often associated with new technologies. Independent case studies show that SSDs create a new storage playing field and manufacturers suggest that conventional spinning disk technology is near its final breath. I predict within five years, SSDs will populate more than 90 percent of all server systems and NAS. By that time, technology will have caught up to the point where any application will feel right at home on SSDs even the write-intensive ones.

Life Expectancy
With lower power consumption, less heat to dissipate, and no moving parts, come a longer life expectancy for disk drives and other system components. Estimates for SSD data integrity exceed 10 years. Some manufacturers say the data on them could last as long as 100 years. Im impressed enough with 10 to 15 years. SSDs will lengthen the life expectancy of your entire server infrastructure. Think about it. What causes you to upgrade your hardware other than expired lease terms? Failures. The reasonable life expectancy of standard technology is three years. Youre really pushing it beyond that. What is the most failure prone component in your systems? Disk drives. Power supplies run a close second. If power consumption and heat from disks decreases, how much longer will those power supplies last? You guessed it, longer.

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Solid State Drives: The Future of Data Storage?, an Internet.com Storage eBook. 2010, Internet.com, a division of QuinStreet, Inc.

Solid State Drives: The Future of Data Storage?

Could Solid State Spell the End for Hard Drives?

By Paul Rubens

echanical hard drives with spinning disks are doomed to extinction, thanks to solid state flash drives that are becoming cheaper and offering greater capacity by the month. At least thats how some in the data storage industry see it. Outwardly, theres a convincing logic to this argument, especially when you consider whats happened in other markets where devices with moving parts faced competition from solid state electronics. Televisions, telephony and radio equipment, clocks, automobile ignition... the list is endless, and in every case its ended up with the same result: solid state electronic devices have won because they are cheaper to make, more reliable, and offer similar or (usually) superior performance. So when it comes to storage planning, its sensible to at least consider when flash-based SSDs might take over from conventional hard disk drives (HDDs). Right now, SSDs are significantly more expensive per gigabyte than HDDs, and while they offer very fast read speeds, they suffer from slower write speeds, and from the limited number of times flash cells can be written to before they wear out. But flash memory prices are falling rapidly, perhaps by 50 percent to 60 percent a year, and SSD technology is also improving, so write speeds are likely to increase and mem-

ory wear-out is likely to become less of a problem. For example, companies such as California-based SandForce promise technology innovations that will ensure flash cells effectively last 80 times longer than is common now, with write speeds far closer to levels achievable for reads. As prices drop and the capacity and performance of SSDs improves, its likely that first a few, and then an increasing number of HDDs of different types will be replaced by their solid state siblings. But the complete extinction of HDDs is unlikely for many years, if ever, for reasons well get to in a moment.

Fibre Channel Could Go First

So what type of HDDs are likely to be replaced first? David Vellante, a former IDC analyst and founder of the Wikibon project, believes that the first to go will be high-performance Fibre Channel (FC) drives, which are usually bought for their high performance and low access times. He argues that since flash memory prices are falling much faster than HDD prices, the price differential between SSDs and FC HDDs which is currently 15 times greater for SSDs will drop to a multiple of just three in less than three years, and possibly considerably less than that. At that price, SSDs with their faster read speeds will make the competing FC HDDs obsolete, he believes.

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Solid State Drives: The Future of Data Storage?, an Internet.com Storage eBook. 2010, Internet.com, a division of QuinStreet, Inc.

Solid State Drives: The Future of Data Storage?

Mark Peters, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, agrees with at least some of this assessment. Id say that Fibre Channel drives are first in the firing line, said Peters. In general, SSDs will be more attractive than FC drives if they are not too much more expensive. But Peters believes that SSDs will have an impact in the FC drive market much sooner than Vellante anticipates. I think SSD sales will take off next year, he said. Thats because some IT departments will be willing to pay a significant premium over FC disk prices for SSDs that offer higher performance. This should not be too much of a surprise users have always paid more for disk storage than tape, and FC drives rather than lower-performance drives. For applications that require the highest possible I/O performance, why shouldnt they pay more for SSDs? But Peters warns against looking at storage media such as FC drives and SSDs solely on a price per gigabyte basis. If you have a 500GB FC disk and you are only using 200GB, then what is the price per gigabyte? Your effective price per gigabyte is more than twice as high, he said. In any case, price per gigabyte is often not the relevant metric to be looking at when considering switching to SSDs. Companies should also be looking at price per I/O, or price per millisecond of access time, or cost per unit of power a drive consumes, depending on their circumstances, Peters said. And that means that you end up with something like hard drives for capacity, and SSDs for I/O. Of course, it wont all be plain sailing for SSDs. There are two sides to I/O: reading and writing. While SSDs have a clear advantage when it comes to read speeds, what about the write side of things? And lets not forget about the limited life of SSD memory cells. I think these problems are overblown, said Peters. Well overcome poor write speeds with techniques like caching using DRAM, and will be able to get around wear problems with techniques like wear leveling and over provisioning. In any case, conventional hard drives often fail in a matter 5
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of months, and those that dont are typically replaced every two or three years anyway.

SSDs Obstacles: Tiering, Inertia

There are other problems to consider if you are adopting a hard drives for capacity, SSDs for I/O strategy. How, for example, do you make sure the right data is on the right medium? To get the full performance benefits of SSDs and the cheap storage benefits of spinning disks, you may end up needing a whole new software layer to help move data around in a tiering approach, Peters warns. But there are companies like Compellent and Sun working on the problem. Another thing that may slow the advance of SSDs is the fact that there is an enormous installed base of FC drives around the world. The stickiness of any given technology shouldnt be underestimated when there is lots of it about. Look at tape storage it is still a multi-billion dollar business, and holding its own too. IT departments are rightly cautious when it comes to making changes and abandoning investments, so SSDs may be adopted far slower than the economic case dictates. One thing is pretty much certain, however: delays wont be caused by vendors dragging their feet. All the major vendors are looking at SSD technology its not just a couple of them that are interested in pushing it, said Peters. Indeed, business from the likes of EMC, Sun, IBM, and HP, have made STEC the early winner in the SSD sweepstakes. Going forward, STEC will face greater competition from newer entrants like SandForce, Intel, where the technology has attracted the attention of co-founder Gordon Moore, and Fusion-IO the startup that managed to lure Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak out of retirement. With all that excitement, perhaps analysts claims are not that far-fetched. While conventional hard disk drives may not be obsolete in the foreseeable future, it appears certain that many of them will have been replaced by SSDs by the time 2012 rolls around.

Solid State Drives: The Future of Data Storage?, an Internet.com Storage eBook. 2010, Internet.com, a division of QuinStreet, Inc.

Solid State Drives: The Future of Data Storage?

SSDs, The Pros and Cons

By Pam Baker
Storage vendors are all struggling with how to implement around SSDs whether to take baby steps or big leaps. Whatever they decide, we should see some interesting new products this year. One key question remains center of the discussion: will vendors charge a premium for SSD performance and enhanced functionality or will they pass on savings and establish a new performance vs. cost expectation? I hope they price in the savings, said Ruth. Unit pricing will not be the only consideration, however. Solid-state drives offer 50 to 100x performance improvement in certain applications and specifications over traditional hard disk drives, said Troy Winslow, director of marketing at Intel NAND Solutions Group. This performance improvement, particularly read and write input operations per second (IOPS), combined with lower power consumption in both idle and active states, means solid-state drives deliver greater performance and consume less power than traditional storage. Thus total cost impact is likely to take precedence over unit costs. The decision to purchase SSD is almost always driven by a compelling return on investment (ROI), said Ron Lloyd, product marketing manager at EMC Corp. The combination of SSD technology, SATA technology, and advanced quality of service software features has changed how customers evaluate and plan their storage investments.

olid state disks made a splash in consumer technology, now the technology looks set to dominate the enterprise storage market. Get ready for a disruption in the storage ecosystem, said Burton Group Analyst Gene Ruth. Given the overwhelming challenges IT organizations face today, is that predicted disruption coming soon, or will it merely end up on hold? HP agrees with industry insiders that SSD will be more widely used in storage systems as early as next year and as a result, is working closely with its partners now to deliver innovative solid state storage technology solutions, said Jieming Zhu, distinguished technologist at HP StorageWorks.

To SSD or Not to SSD

The storage industry has been trapped within the confines of a hard disk drive so long that its difficult for it to think out of that box, said Ruth. SSD technologies are game-changing and drive a whole new thought pattern around persistent storage. Ultimately, SSDs challenge the infrastructure all around them. Traditional RAID may not apply, buses are too slow, driver stacks have too much latency, file systems dont properly leverage them, form factors dont apply, performance is not linear, and on and on its a brave new world. Well have to see how vendors choose to live in it, said Ruth.

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Solid State Drives: The Future of Data Storage?, an Internet.com Storage eBook. 2010, Internet.com, a division of QuinStreet, Inc.

Solid State Drives: The Future of Data Storage?

Pros
Energy efficient. Using SSD technology reduces the overall power consumption of devices such as disk arrays, servers, and laptops, but also improves their performance and environmental ruggedness, said HPs Zhu. Low latency. SSDs implemented for use as physical disk space allow users to automatically migrate active blocks of data between drive types, increasing performance by keeping frequently accessed blocks of data on Tier 0 SSD storage, and dynamically moves inactive data to less expensive, lower tiers of storage. By combining automated tiered storage feature sets with SSDs, end-users have the ability to purchase only the number of drives required to house active blocks of data, where other vendors require the costly purchase for entire volumes, said Bob Fine, director of Product Marketing at Compellent. It creates a Tier 0 storage environment and we will see a Tier 0 to Tier 2 storage infrastructure in the near future, predicts Russ Johnson, senior vice president and general manager of AMCCs Storage Business Unit. AMCC is working with SSD companies to ensure its RAID controllers take advantage of SSD, allowing a mix of drive types without performance impacts. We believe that 2009 will be the year that SSD finds it home. Durability. SSD is designed to operate in more extreme environments of up to 70 degrees Celsius. With no moving parts, SSD drives are less fragile and silent than hard disks, which are more susceptible to operational and nonoperational shock and vibration, explains Zhu. Control of unstructured files. The incredible rise of unstructured data is having a dramatic impact on storage and data management applications. Were seeing growing demand for specialized storage systems, including storage media that give users the control or flexibility they need to manage unstructured files over their lifetime, said Jon Affeld, senior director of Product Marketing and Business

Development at BlueArc, a provider of high-performance, unified network storage systems. In the near term it will serve as a powerful caching tier for fast access to files that are in high demand. Moving forward, we can expect the use of SSDs to get more sophisticated as we see data management applications incorporating more powerful search, classification, archiving and retrieval functions. Compatibility with operating systems. All SSD vendors provide existing input/output storage protocol compatibility, interoperable with the existing operating system storage stack, said Zhu. Commoditized components. This is a classic Adam Smithian market evolution, said CTO and inventor of Fusion-ios solution, David Flynn. What used to be a single, vertically integrated provider becomes a layered market where some people build the components, others integrate them (with some bit of value added), and the market moves to include many players competing on many levels, resulting in price reductions. Im not saying this market transformation is going to happen by tomorrow, said Flynn. But, given the geometric growth of the performance gap between processors and storage, and the geometric decline in cost of NAND flash leading to a Moores Law Squared effect in the benefit to cost ratio it is going to happen faster than people would think.

Cons
Questionable life expectancy of SSD. NAND Flash, the underlying technology of todays majority SSD products, has write wear-out limitations, with embedded processors, software, and over provisioning of capacity, among other things, said Zhu. SSD manufactures have addressed this limitation, however, this inevitably adds another link in the chain of the overall reliability of SSD-based systems that must be rigorously tested and certified. The lack of standard measurement of the life expectancy of SSD is a major drawback, Zhu warns.

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Solid State Drives: The Future of Data Storage?, an Internet.com Storage eBook. 2010, Internet.com, a division of QuinStreet, Inc.

Solid State Drives: The Future of Data Storage?

SSD technology is nascent. HP and other industry leaders including Intel and Sun do not predict that SSD will replace hard drives in the enterprise. Like any new technology, SSD is still at the testing stages so there are a number of factors and challenges that need to be addressed before it matures in the enterprise space, said Zhu. Not ideal for all. SSD is not recommended for everyone, it is ideally suited for businesses that require high-performance, intensive I/O operations; are power sensitive; and/ or are in a rugged environment, said Zhu. HP expects SSD to be used as a premium performance tier in well-balanced storage deployments.

More Expensive. SSDs are a bit more expensive, have less capacity, and a finite number of write cycles when compared to traditional spinning drives, but those drawbacks are quickly disappearing, explains Charles Kaplan, chief technology strategist at Mazu Networks, now part of Riverbed, a wide area network optimization solutions provider. All things considered, CIOs are left guessing as to when precisely to make the jump. In the enterprise, the benefits over traditional disk drives speed, reliability, efficiency, lower power consumption make SSDs a major disrupter in the storage space, said Michael Cornwell, lead technologist for Flash Memory at Sun Microsystems. However key players are only just beginning to recognize the market opportunity this technology has to offer.

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Solid State Drives: The Future of Data Storage?, an Internet.com Storage eBook. 2010, Internet.com, a division of QuinStreet, Inc.

Solid State Drives: The Future of Data Storage?

SSD Makers Wrestle with Performance Degradation

By Herman Mehling

olid state drives are known for performance that is many times that of hard disk drives (HDDs), but whats not so well known is that SSD performance tends to degrade over time, and benchmarks show that SSDs can perform much better new than when heavily used. The issue is an important one when making enterprise storage buying decisions, and its created an opportunity for vendors that can develop SSDs that perform more consistently over time. Among the vendors that claim to have solved the problem are Fusion-io, Pliant Technology, and STEC. SSDs suffer from a difficulty that doesnt exist in HDDs the flash must be erased before new data can be written into it, said Jim Handy, an analyst at Objective Analysis, a market research firm specializing in SSDs and semiconductors. This erase, which can take up to a half second, would bring the SSD to its knees were it not for some clever workarounds that SSD makers build into their controllers, said Handy. One of these is to over-provision, to build more flash into the SSD than appears to the outside world.

SSD technologies typically suffer significant performance degradation over time by as much as 50 percent or more as more data is written to the NAND flash memory and as applications accessing the device vary the read-towrite ratio, said Greg Goelz, vice president of marketing at Pliant Technology. This performance droop causes big issues for missioncritical, I/O-intensive data center and high-performance computing environments, which require consistent, predictable performance over time and across a wide range of workloads, said Goelz.

Problems with NAND Flash

A NAND flash cell is a small electrical storage device with a finite number of uses due to the effects of programming (removing the charge) and erasing the cell. During a program/ erase event, the NAND flash cell can degrade to a point where too much energy is trapped in the cell. This means the cell cannot be drained and is stuck in a full state, said Lance Smith, senior vice president of product marketing for Fusion-io. In other words, bits will remain a 0 for NAND flash.

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Solid State Drives: The Future of Data Storage?, an Internet.com Storage eBook. 2010, Internet.com, a division of QuinStreet, Inc.

Solid State Drives: The Future of Data Storage?

Unlike traditional hard disk drives, SSDs must avoid writing repeatedly in the same location. Otherwise, a cell will wear out. SSD designers can avoid this problem by writing across the entire capacity of the drive before writing to the same location twice. This is called wear leveling. A good design will attempt to perform the erasure well ahead of time to ensure the write event is not held up due to the lengthy amount of time it takes to perform the erasure, said Smith. Otherwise, write performance will be limited by the rate of erasures, which is much slower. To handle these issues, SSD makers, including Fusion-io, have implemented a wear-leveling algorithm that creates an abstraction layer. Here, you have a logical block and a physical block, said Smith. The logical block points data to a different physical cell with every write, ensuring that information is not erased and that cells experience consistent wear over time. A background maintenance application called a groomer reclaims erased blocks of data and moves data round the NAND flash chip as needed, maximizing the use of the space and ensuring that no data is erased. The grooming process itself, however, can lead to reductions in data speed as data is coalesced to accommodate newer data and ensure data integrity on the NAND flash chips.

However, for write-heavy applications, users can increase the amount of over-provisioning to 40, 50, or 60 percent to suit their needs. In this way, users can use exactly the amount of space they need for the write cycle to perform with maximum proficiency.

Consistent SSD Performance

Both Pliant and STEC have created SSDs with proprietary controllers and firmware designed to deliver consistent performance over time. Pliants new Enterprise Flash Drives (EFDs) have a number of unique features and techniques to eliminate performance droop, said Goelz. Our EFD delivers two to four times greater sustained I/O performance than todays fastest SSDs, providing consistent, predictable system performance across a wide range of workloads over an extended period of time, said Goelz. The EFDs maintain this performance level whether reading or writing data, and even as enterprise applications vary the read-to-write ratio. Goelz said Pliants EFD is the only solution able to perform common tasks such as on-going memory reclaim and other data integrity management functions transparently in the background, without affecting I/O performance. It also transparently manages a host of more advanced tasks, including background Patrol Read, triple redundant ECC (Error Correction Code) protected metadata, and extended ECC to ensure data integrity without affecting performance. Pliants SAS interface enables EFDs to perform concurrent reading and writing operations at four times the link bandwidth of the single-port, half-duplex SATA interface, which is commonly used by competitive SSD products, according to Goelz.

Over-Provisioning Offers a Solution

Smith said Fusion-io has addressed the issue by allowing customers to over-provision, giving them extra grooming space for data depending on their write needs. Fusion-ios 80GB ioDrives are factory configured with 20 percent over-provisioning to accommodate typical usage in the enterprise environment.

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Solid State Drives: The Future of Data Storage?, an Internet.com Storage eBook. 2010, Internet.com, a division of QuinStreet, Inc.

Solid State Drives: The Future of Data Storage?

STECs Approach
STECs drives appear in almost all major storage OEM sockets for many reasons, with performance being one of the most important ones, said Scott Shadley, STECs senior manager for SSD technical marketing. Our drives are designed to eliminate the performance problems that exist within many SSD products, said Shadley. How do we do this? Our drives are developed in such a way that they do not expect any type of idle time from the host system. This is vital, as a drive that expects free time will have very different performance parameters. Shadley said STEC drives operate under specific IP and technology that allow for all activities within the drive to work simultaneously without affecting the host.

STECs drives also have built-in controllers and in-house firmware focused on allowing the drives to accept host commands, move data within the drive, perform ECC and other background activities under all workloads with no affect on throughput or performance to the host system. This is accomplished by significant design effort focused around the transactions within the host-drive interfaces. The raw media functions within the drives are intentionally separated and buffered from the host signaling in case any slowing or issues presented on the media interfaces are not pushed through the controllers to the host. This prevents any slowing in drive performance.

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Solid State Drives: The Future of Data Storage?, an Internet.com Storage eBook. 2010, Internet.com, a division of QuinStreet, Inc.

Solid State Drives: The Future of Data Storage?

SSDs Take Center Stage

By Drew Robb
This is accomplished by implementing tiers of storage. SSD isnt cost effective enough or big enough in terms of capacity to dump everything on it. And its unlikely that this will happen, at least in the near term. What should be done, then, is to put performance-critical data on flash, as well as key applications, as feasible. Przystas even suggests loading key parts of a large application on flash and having the rest of the application run on lower storage tiers. With smart use of SSD and SATA, as per the above scenario, the end result is 28 percent fewer drives, 60 percent more drive IOPS, 21 percent savings in terms of power and cooling, and 17 percent lower drive costs. The numbers in terms of IOPs are roughly 80 IOPS for SATA, 160/200 IOPS for FC, and 5000 IOPS for flash. A big reason for these gains is the parallel read capability of flash. That delivers an access time of 1 ms or less. The fastest FC disks, on the other hand, have response rates anywhere from 10 to 60 ms. Further, there is little performance deterioration on flash during heavy usage unlike FC, which chokes off badly above a particular point. The worst flash is likely to get under the heaviest loads is an access rate falling to about 3 ms. Thus, flashs appeal for top-tier storage and applications. As for fears that flash isnt as durable as disk, Przystas pointed out that EMC offers the same five- to seven-year warranty for flash as SATA drives. And he expects that to go up over time.

olid state drives also known as flash are everywhere. In fact, they may even have done a great service to mankind by diverting messaging away from green IT. The big server and storage OEMs seem to have gotten over their fixation with green IT, courtesy of their enthusiasm for SSD. The price of SSDs continues to fall although it is still an order of magnitude or two above that of the hard drive. But vendors seem to get it now, and they appear to understand how to present the concept so it sells itself. Lou Przystas, a senior advisory consultant at the corporate executive briefing center of EMC served up a good example of how vendors will entice everyone to jump aboard the SSD bandwagon very shortly. He laid out an example within an array to highlight how SSD will initially replace Fibre Channel (FC) disks at least to some degree. And helped somewhat by SATA, too. The original 55 TB configuration of the array consisted of 244 FC disks, each of 300 GB (FC) disks and running at 15k rpm. By reducing the number of FC disks to 136, adding 32 x 1 TB SATA disks along with 8 SSDs (each of 73 GB), you arrive at the same 55 TB capacity. On top of that, however, you get a whole lot more lot more performance, lower power consumption, and reduced cost.

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Solid State Drives: The Future of Data Storage?, an Internet.com Storage eBook. 2010, Internet.com, a division of QuinStreet, Inc.

Solid State Drives: The Future of Data Storage?

Although SSD costs are high, they have come down a lot during the past year. One SSD equals the IOPS of 30 15k FC disks. By setting up SSD for the fastest applications and the most heavily used data, FC for the second tier, and SATA for volume storage of less accessed data, big gains can be realized. A real world example concerns an Oracle-based transaction telecom billing system. By swapping 4 percent of the FC drives to SSD, the response time was brought down by 60 percent. In this case, swapping 16 out of 384 FC drives to flash resulted in massive gain. The original FC disks with striping for performance could manage 12 ms at best. Flash brought that down to 1 ms or less. Transaction-intensive applications with heavy IOPS on reads are great for flash, said Przystas.

How about price? While most try to compare flash with hard drives, this is missing the point. The real comparison for now concerns flash with RAM, with the former being about 50 times less expensive. The latest SSDs even harness RAM to speed up writes, which was an early criticism of the technology. EMC predicts that flash will be priced very close to the cost of FC in about three years. When that happens, watch out disk! Flash is revolutionizing the industry, said Przystas. There will come a time when we are saying, Remember when we had spinning disks?

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Solid State Drives: The Future of Data Storage?, an Internet.com Storage eBook. 2010, Internet.com, a division of QuinStreet, Inc.