Tuesday, January 24, 2012

All About SSD Caching Mechanisms

By Joseph Robertson


SSD is an acronym for Solid State Drive, more commonly called the electronic disk that utilises a solid state retention space to the information and offers access to it in an identical manner as would a standard I/O hard drive. Hard Disk Drives HDDs and floppy disks are differentiated from SSDs on the basis of their information caching mechanism.

HDDs store data on electromechanical movable parts like spinning disks, etc. SSDs, on the other hand, store data on micro chips that are non changeable in nature and containing no moving parts like those of HDDs.

SSDs consist of flash memory modules that function in such a manner that the device keeps the data or data even when the power is turned off. It differentiates itself from RAM in the way that it does not need permanent power supply just to keep the info in the memory as it can hold information for months. Caching SSDs have now become a crucial part of the notebook designs and ultrabooks like Apple MacBook Pro, and so on.

The main cause behind it can be regarded to the undeniable fact that it does not warm up. Normal disk drives consisted mainly of metallic wheels that used to spin data at around 7200rpm that produced heat within the system. SSDs have micro chips instead of the wheel like structure. All of the data is cached in the chips and the leading to no heat emission.

At first the ssd caching speed was awfully low as showed by Tomshardware.com of on 14mb/s. Technical advancements have led companies like Mtron to produce SSDs having a 120mb/s read, and 90mb/s writing speed. SS drives cache data noiselessly. This can also be regarded to the fact that these drives do not have a spinning metallic wheel rather they store info in the micro-chips within them.

Undoubtedly, storing or caching data through SSDs is the most efficient way it includes a cost. A normal 64Gb ssd drive would cost you anywhere between $100-$150, while you can pick up a 1TB HDD drive for the same cost.




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