The Time for SSDs Has Arrived

Along with this new technology comes a new barrage of techno-speak. So that you can decide on which drive to purchase and keep up with the geek speak, here are some of the things to know about SSDs. Controller – The old timers are very familiar with this term. Hard Drive controllers have been around since the dawn of the personal computer. In the old days they were massive I/O cards with jumpers and secret firmware and you had to know your way around them to make a hard drive function. For a time they disappeared into the onboard chips of the motherboard and got smart enough to virtually disappear from the vast array of need to know knowledge. Adding a hard drive became (dare I say it) Plug and Play. Well, the SSD needs it's own breed of controller. You might consider it a Pre-controller because your onboard drive controller is still there and working along with the new onboard controller in the SSD. This is what separates one SSD from another. It's role is crucial. It performs the heavy lifting needed to achieve the super performance that the SSD brings to the table. Using multiple cores for running the drive, performing data compression, and executing drive optimizations. When purchasing an SSD you want to know which controller it uses, because some controllers have a very checkered history. As of today, only Samsung and OCZ use their own in-house designed and manufactured controllers. All other brands use some other company's controller which should give Samsung and OCZ the advantage. NAND Flash - Flash memory is an electronic non-volatile computer storage device that can be electrically erased and reprogrammed. The NAND type is primarily used in main memory, memory cards, USB flash drives, solid-state drives, and similar products, for general storage and transfer of data. NAND memory is popular due to its speed, durability, and relatively low cost compared to DRAM. Though there are various types of NAND flash, all SSDs on the market currently use this type of memory. TRIM – This is a fairly new term you will hear a lot with regard to SSDs. It performs the crucial function of helping the SSD optimize itself when it is idle, so NOT having Trim support is bad. Plus, not only should your SSD support Trim, but your OS needs to as well. Your OS sends the Trim command to the drive's controller to tell it which bits of data can be safely deleted. Without Trim the drive could theoretically just fill up and degrade. Since the memory cells in your SSD cannot be overwritten, they must be erased before new data is written to them. Trim also assists in the reorganization of data similar to defragmenting a hard drive. Trim is supported in Windows 7 and 8, and in all modern SSDs. So if you will be using Windows XP you will want to install a Trim Utility of some kind to keep your SSD working as efficient as possible. Asynchronous and Synchronous Flash – All you really need to know here is that asynchronous flash is not as fast or expensive as synchronous flash. It's not uncommon to see Asynchronous Flash used in “value drives”, while synchronous flash is used in high-performance drives. IOPS – This is how many operations per second the drive is capable of performing. Not to be confused with read/write speeds because it's not a measurement of how fast the writes or reads of the drive are, instead it's the number of reads and writes. Secure Erase – This is the only way to totally wipe the contents of an SSD. Simply due to the way an SSD functions, having to erase before it can write new data, it's never faster than when it first was connected and was completely empty. Trim will never completely remove all data from an SSD and so a utility program with Secure Erase is the only way to bring an SSD back to it's original performance level. SSD Utilities – Free utility software is what makes it possible to monitor, optimize, and tweak an SSDs performance. Samsung, Intel, and OCZ drives come with bundled free utility programs. You can also use the free CrystalDiskInfo program (http://goo.gl/yN0mO) with any SSD on the market. OK, now you are armed with the knowledge you need to make an informed decision about which SSD to purchase. Go out there and make it happen! I find myself frequently looking at two different types of installation for SSD drives. I'm either trying to hang on to an older workstation by giving it new performance with the installation of an SSD or I'm looking at making a new workstation have that better than average burst of speed that only an SSD can provide. When considering the first type of install I do a little survey of the older workstation. How much of it's existing hard drive is being used. Where I work it's typical for the local drive to have well under 80GB of data on the drive. Even after several years of being in service. This is because most of the files being used are stored on the network for sharing and backup. That means I can get away with purchasing a smaller SSD and perhaps a better grade for this upgrade. Either a 64GB or 128GB drive is typically what I'll choose. I have a universal drive connection device (SATA to USB) that I will use to connect the new hard drive to the old workstation and then use the wonderful utility from Macrium Reflect (http://goo.gl/vk5Dx) to clone the current drive onto the new SSD. After that it's a simple matter of swapping the old HD for the new SSD and the world is now a better place to live in. If the old workstation was running Windows XP I'll then get my Trim Utility installed and configured. In the second type of install there is a little more to consider and decide. How this new machine is going to be used is critical. If it is going to live it's life as a business workstation then just like with the older workstation upgrade I won't need a large capacity SSD nor any additional storage space. If however this baby is going to have to store larger amounts of data or do Video or CAD functions I'm going to want more SSD space. Or perhaps I can use a smaller SSD for the OS and Installed Programs while using an inexpensive HDD for data storage. This is a little trickier to set up for a novice user to insure they save files on the HDD and not the precious SSD space, but it's very possible to pull off. So whatever you are thinking of building, the time to include an SSD in your build is NOW! Life in the fast lane is definitely better. Find me on MeWe.