Solid State Winchesters. Solid State Hard Drive SSD. Subtleties of operation and tuning. History of the emergence and further development of SSD

Solid-state hard drives for the computer are gadgets that allow you to store various data, as well as process them at a very high speed. The secret of high performance lies in the fundamentally different device of this gadget. There are no rotating pancakes in it, above which a writing head hovers - as in mechanical analogues. This is the main reason for excellent performance.

Despite the fact that the disks of this type have both their advantages and disadvantages, they are increasingly mounted on laptops and other computers along with their outdated counterparts. But less and less often you can find PC models that use only old-type drives.

What it is

A solid-state drive is a special, non-mechanical storage device that places all the information in memory chips located on a special board. In addition to them, the design of the device in question also has a large number of other components.

There are two main varieties of drives of this kind:

This is the type of chip used to store and process data. There are no serious differences between them, but DRAM disks are equipped with a built-in battery. Sometimes you can find on sale SSHD - hybrid devices. In the same housing are located both conventional disks and memory chips. The read and write operation is faster than the HDD, but slower than a regular SSD.

Drive device

This component of a personal computer consists of the following components:

The most important details are the controller and flash memory. They are the main reason for the large increase in productivity of this device.

Thus, regardless of whether you use 1% or 99%, you will still get great speeds. This performance leap is really growing, but for those who need flash speeds, it's definitely worth it. Theoretically, a maximum of 3 can be set.

Despite the fact that flash memory is expensive, when you see how it works, you will see why it requires such prices. To get a complete picture of how the various comparison options are, see the graph below. Then we go a little deeper and summarize how you should make the decision. So, have you seen the numbers, heard the pros and cons of each option that you have to choose? Well, of course, it all depends on your budget and what the system is designed for.

Controller

The controller itself contains:

The SSD controller performs the functions of:

• reading, writing, caching;
• data encryption;
• monitoring (S.M.A.R.T.);
• data compression (some models of controllers).

Flash memory

Most often, these gadgets use a chip like NAND. It is volatile and has a relatively low cost compared to its counterparts and allows you to save data even in the absence of a constant power supply.

NAND memory can be of various types:

The MLC type holds more than one bit of data in one cell. But at the same time, schemes of this kind have some drawbacks, such as a small resource, as well as low read and write speeds. When using the SLC type, only one bit is written to one cell. This provides greater durability and data processing speed. The disadvantages include the price - it is 2 times higher than the cost of MLC.

How does it work

The operation of a conventional HDD is extremely simple, reading and writing information in it can be carried out at a time. SSD works on a different principle. This provides a significant increase in productivity. In the memory circuits of the gadget in question, all operations are performed in a sectorial manner. Recording is carried out in blocks of 4 Kb, and data deletion is performed in blocks of 512 Kb.

When processing information, the following operations are performed:

• reading a block of memory;
• all required bytes are modified;
• erasing the processed block in the memory circuit;
• the movement algorithm is executed, another block location is calculated;
• the block is overwritten in the new sector.

Video: HDD and SSD Settings

Drive Reliability

SSDs are believed to be much more reliable than HDDs. There are serious reasons for this. Life time solid state drive depends on so many factors.

The most important:

• total amount of rewritable information;
• the number of overwrites the total memory.

It depends on these two factors how long the gadget can last for its user. But the most important advantage in comparison with a conventional HDD is its immunity to mechanical stress. SSDs can be carried, shaken, and even dropped while reading and writing data. This will in no way harm the information stored on it. For a regular HDD, such actions are unacceptable.

Photo: 3 terabytes external hard drive

Also, the gadget in question is more resistant to various kinds of electromagnetic fields and similar influences. The probability of damage to the circuit due to a nearby strong magnet or object with similar properties is virtually eliminated. What is especially important for tablets, laptops and other devices that move with its owner.

Safety

One of the most important strengths of SSDs is data storage security. It is connected specifically with the method of recording - it performs the electric method, which allows more complete erasure of previously recorded information. In addition to the standard method, specialized softwareperforming a complete removal.

Recording to a conventional HDD is performed mechanically. Accordingly, in this case, all kinds of traces always remain. Which leads to the possibility of data theft or recovery after deletion. Almost all SSD controllers, as well as SSHD, are now equipped with special protection to encrypt recorded data. That is why recovering erased information is difficult.

Optimization

The gadget of this type operates extremely quickly without additional optimization tools. Perhaps this is due to the lack of the need to move a special block of heads. This saves a lot of time. However, with certain actions you can make the job even faster.

• indexing;
• swap file;
• Prefetch and SuperFetch;
• system Restore.

To disable data indexing, just go to the SSD properties and in the window that opens, uncheck the box next to “allow file indexing”.

Then you should close the window and continue working. Thus, it is possible to achieve a productivity increase of 3-4%.

Relocating or completely disabling the swap file allows for a rather large increase in speed.

To do this, just follow these steps:

• open control panel;
• run a shortcut called administration;
• select a service section.

We find the required item and double-click on it. We put a dot opposite “without a swap file”.

To disable Prefetch, you need to find the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \\ SYSTEM \\ CurrentControlSet \\ Control \\ SessionManager \\ Memory Management \\ PrefetchParameters. After that, change the value of the parameters EnablerPrefetcher and EnableSuperfetch to 0.

To disable SuperFetch, you need to find the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \\ SYSTEM \\ CurrentControlSet \\ Control \\ SessionManager \\ Memory Management. It has options ClearPageFileAtShutdown and LargeSystemCache, you should change their value to 0.

When performing all of the above actions, you can speed up the functioning of a personal computer by as much as 15-20%. This will positively affect the operation of both the operating system and various programs that require constant access to the drive.

Video: HDD Reliability Statistics

Advantages and disadvantages

Drives of this type have both their advantages and disadvantages.

The advantages should include the following features:

• high speed data processing (all modern models - more than 200 Mb / s);
• low power consumption (less by 1 W compared to a HDD of the same volume);
• almost complete absence of heating during operation;
• complete silent operation.

Testing conducted by Intel showed that during operation notebooks equipped with solid-state drives heat up 12.2 0 C less than similar models equipped with conventional HDDs. Drives of this type have a significantly lower weight, which is especially important for portable devices.

There are also various kinds of disadvantages:

• relatively high cost;
• limited number of rewrite cycles;
• the inability to recover previously deleted information.

The cost of a solid state drive is its most important drawback. The price for 1 GB of information is on average several times higher than the price for the same amount of HDD. But every day the cost of these gadgets is falling, which is why SSDs are used more and more often.

Used memory cells have a limited resource. That is why you should be very careful about the swap file and various applications that often access ROMs. Although the resource in today's gadgets is quite large, it is necessary with the help of special programs to constantly monitor the condition.

The inability to recover data is both a virtue and a disadvantage. As this feature minimizes the chance of information theft. But at the same time, there is no possibility of recovery as a result of erroneous deletion.

Manufacturer Price Overview

The cost of gadgets of this type from different manufacturers can vary greatly. But when carrying out reviews and an objective assessment of similar models from various brands, it turns out that the mark-up is carried out mainly for the brand.

Today it becomes clear that the drives of this type are the future, and conventional HDDs are gradually becoming a thing of the past. SSD is becoming more and more popular every day, this is a consequence of its portability and high speed. A growing number of different laptops, tablets, smartphones and just ordinary personal computers are equipped with the equipment of this type.

The abbreviation SSD stands for "Solid-State Drive", which roughly translates as a solid-state drive or drive.

Of course, we will consider the main characteristics of such devices in this article, but I would like to do this, starting from a real example. Such a case recently, by the way, presented itself to me, since my working hard drive began to show obvious signs of dying (a wedge appeared, which manifested itself in spontaneous freezing of the entire system, accompanied by a characteristic click).

Coincidentally, we bought one SSD drive (a solid-state hard drive) at our company (for testing), and it turned out to be with me, for the reason stated above! :)

Well, it would be a sin not to take advantage of such a moment and not conduct a comparative testing of this SSD hard drive and its predecessors, designed on the basis of.

We unpacked the new product, having crowded around it with our entire IT department :)

From the marking on the box it follows that this is a 64 gigabyte solid state drive from Plextor, equipped with an external SATA connection interface and a maximum transfer speed of 6 Gb / s (gigabits per second). This will be somewhere the theoretical maximum of the third generation SATA interface (600 megabytes per second).

Remember the interface speeds and their history we talked about?

The form factor of our solid-state drive, as can be seen from its size and the inscription on the box, is 2.5 inches. That is, it can be installed with equal success, both in desktop computers and laptops. More expensive models come with a special mount that allows you to install the device in 3.5 inch compartments. In our case, in the kit only - sealed plastic packaging :)

Here are a couple of photos so you can estimate the size of your SSD hard drive:

In thickness, it is a little less than a centimeter. And here - in comparison with the "usual" hard drive:

Moreover, the mass of SSD is absolutely not comparable with its "older" brother. Compared to him, he is a feather. After all, there are no moving mechanical parts that need to be protected from external influences, which means that it makes no sense to make a thick metal body-base. The outer coating is aluminum and plastic, therefore the weight is appropriate: 75 grams. The power supply voltage of the device is five volts.

The estimated uptime (according to the manufacturer) is 1,500,000 hours, and the official warranty period indicated on the box is three years. From which we can conclude that the drive must be reliable enough. Is it really? Time will tell:)

It is not a thankful task to talk about cost in such a fast-changing market as the information technology market, but at the time of writing this article, the price of this solution was around eighty dollars.

Generally, what is inherently solid-state SSD drive? This is a large flash drive (equipped with a high-speed SATA interface) with quick access, a cache from a certain amount and a specialized data transfer and processing controller responsible for the optimal operation of the medium.

Solid State Drive (Solid State Drive) in contrast to the HDD (Hard Disk Drive) have a number of obvious advantages (along with implicit disadvantages), but first things first. Let's start with a nice one :)

SSD hard drives are characterized by:

1. short data access time (regardless of fragmentation and location)
2. the same speed for any sampling sequence, since the organization of information storage here is a matrix of flash memory cells from which sampling occurs.
3. the absence of moving parts, which means a complete absence of noise
4. resistance to various vibrations and physical influences
5. less (relative to HDD drives up to 30%) power consumption

Here's what a disassembled SSD looks like:

At the top left is the RAM chip (DDR3), which is the drive’s cache, and to the right is the Western Digital device control controller. At the bottom there are eight fast NAND flash memory chips (eight gigabytes each), which in total make up the total capacity of this solid-state drive - 64 gigabytes.

Here is another photo to fix the image, so to speak :)

Let's say a few words about the memory chip itself. This is not exactly a cache, or rather, it caches (remembers) data, but not at all to speed up the device’s work, and here information about allocation tables and deleted / occupied cells is dynamically recorded. The addresses of worn-out flash memory cells, where recording can no longer be performed, are also written here.

Now, as for the controller: its main task (as we have already mentioned) is to provide read and write operations, but it is also responsible for managing the structure of data placement. According to his wear control tables, he "looks" in which cells have already been recorded, and in which not yet, and evens out these indicators.

Thus, the controller provides the longest possible life of our SSD drive, causing its cells to wear evenly. Therefore, a correctly programmed and configured controller can significantly change both individual speed indicators and the durability of the device as a whole.

So, let's continue the review! On the back of the box of our solid-state SSD drive, we found an interesting table in terms of information content:

What useful information can we get here? First: an indication of the size of the memory chip (cache) of the disk. We see that for models with a capacity of 64 gigabytes it is equal to 128 megabytes, for a capacity of 128 gigabytes this is 256 megabytes and for 256 gigabytes it is 512 megabytes of ultrafast RAM, which is used for the needs of the medium itself.

The Performance section shows us the linear (sequential) speed value reading from a solid-state drive - “Read Speed” (520 megabytes per second) and speed records to the “Write Speed” disk (90, 200 and 390 megabytes per second for different SSD capacities, respectively).

Also pay attention to an interesting inscription at the very bottom, which says that in the performance determination programs (benchmarks) “ATTO Disk” and “Crystal Disk Mark” the disk subsystem shows the best performance index.

Now let's test this moment! And let's start with the CrystalDiskMark program.

But first, a little background. The fact is that for more complete testing, I collected (connected) on my working computer a small collection of hard drives that, fortunately, were within my reach and it would be just a shame not to “drive” them :)

So, in our testing take part:

• solid state hard SSD Plextor 64Gb M5S SATA Drive - New
• One Terabyte Seagate Barracuda SATA 7200 rpm - Almost New
• Western Digital 320 Gb IDE 7200 rpm - New

Note: abbreviation RPM stands for (round per minute - revolutions per minute) and characterizes the spindle speed of the hard drive. In general, the more the better. The default values \u200b\u200bare 5400 and 7200 rpm. There are high-speed devices with speeds of 10,000 and 15,000 rpm, but they are extremely expensive and are not used in home or office computers.

As you can see, the company picked up a very decent. Discs are not worn. And I specifically wanted to test drives with various data transfer interfaces. Remember, about working with, we talked in a separate article?

Testing SSD drive

So, let's start our testing with CrystalDiskMark.

We start the program and see such a simple window:

The photo above already shows the result of testing our SSD drive. Let’s based on them and consider the interface of this simple, but useful program.

In the upper left corner there is a button with the inscription "All", by clicking on which the testing procedure starts. To the right of it is a drop-down list through which we can indicate the number of "passes" of the test before displaying the final result. By default, here is the number "5". Next is the size of the test file that will be written to disk. It is from the results of its recording that the program will judge the linear (sequential) speeds of the operations of writing and reading to the medium. Even to the right is the list from which you can choose the hard drive itself, which we will test.

As you can see, my SSD drive plays the role of a system partition (drive "C").

So, we figured out the main parameters. Now let's look at the results themselves. We have two columns here: “ Read MB / s"(Read speed, megabytes per second)," Write MB / s » (write speed, megabytes per second).

According to the first line, as you can see, our solid state drive gave out 237 megabytes per second (for reading) and 102 megabytes per second (for writing). This is for a 100 megabyte file. The second and third lines show the speed when working with small chunks of data (512 and 4 kilobytes, respectively). The general principle here is this: the more files and the smaller the size of each of them, the more time the hard drive needs for any operations on them.

Remember (write) these values \u200b\u200band select another disk (E) for testing. I will have one terabyte SATA hard drive. And here are the results he showed:

As you can see, they are an order of magnitude lower than that of an SSD hard drive, but also not very bad!

Now let's see what our third participant shows - a 320-gigabyte hard drive with an IDE interface?

You can compare the results with each other and draw conclusions based on them. You can also download “Crystal Disk Mark” from our website and conduct the test on your own system, comparing its results with those that I received.

Just want to bring to your attention another program that is designed specifically to measure the speed of SSD drives. It has in its arsenal some more useful features. Let's take a closer look at it:

In the photo above - the test results of my disk for reading (Read) and writing (Write). Notice the selection in the upper left. Here we can see the firmware version (firmware) of the controller - 1.00 and check whether our operating system aligned a solid state drive? If “OK” is here, then everything is fine.

The “Access Time” field shows us the time taken by the device to access the requested data. The line “Score” displays the general summary indicators of the measurement results. The so-called "parrots." Remember how in the cartoon? :)

The program can build us a graph for clarity. To do this, go to the “Tools” menu and select “Compression-Benchmark”.

After that, this window will start:

In it, we will need to click the "Start" button and wait for the completion of the charting procedure. If you want, you can download this utility.

Well? Does God Love Trinity? :) I can not introduce you to another wonderful program for testing and obtaining comprehensive information about the storage devices installed on your computer. The program is called "HD Tune Pro" and is also remarkable for the fact that it has a Russified interface, so working with it is a pleasure.

Here is what one of its tabs looks like with a benchmark (performance rating) of a disk system:

The photo above shows the test results of my Plextor solid state hard drive. What is this program good for? By the fact that it shows not only numerical values, but also in real time draws us a graph by which we can judge the change in certain parameters in dynamics and observe some kind of trend. We will clearly see this in the following screenshots.

What do we see here? The maximum, minimum, and average read speed values \u200b\u200b(we obtained similar values \u200b\u200bin the previous test). A new parameter is disk access time and load percentage. There is a separate switch for measuring the speed of reading and writing to disk.

Well, let's compare the performance with our terabyte SATA drive:

As you can see, the difference is obvious! Of particular interest is the graph that shows the difference with the reading speed at the beginning of the disk and closer to its end (process dynamics). If we look at the graph of a solid-state SSD drive, we will see that its "cardiogram" is almost flat and there are no drops in speed.

Also pay attention to such a function as a temperature indicator of the hard drive, available in this program for HDD disks.

So, let’s explore our “Western Digital” dinosaur :)

As expected, the main indicators are much more modest, but I was surprised by the stability of the read speed over almost the entire surface of the disk. Only at the very end did it noticeably decrease. Also here we see the lowest CPU utilization among all of our subjects.

Let's move on to the next tab of the HD Tune Pro program called Random Access. The photo below shows the number of water-output operations performed by our solid-state hard drive per second for data blocks of different sizes (IOPS - Input Output Per Second), average and maximum data access time, and speed of reading them.

Let's look at the results of the hard drive from "Seagate" (Seagate 1 terabyte):

See how big the difference is in the results? We look at what Western Digital (320 gigabytes of IDE) will demonstrate:

You all see for yourself. In general, the HD Tune Pro program is very good and useful. In addition to the "benchmarks" themselves, she can show us our drive (they are located on the "Health" tab). You can also enable real-time disk monitoring and scan the surface of the drive for presence (bad blocks).

You can also conduct this program your own testing or compare with my indicators.

Let's look at another tab of the program - “Benchmark file”. The principle of its operation is somewhat similar to that used in CrystalDiskMark, which we reviewed in the middle of the article.

The test is launched by the “Start” button, but before that you can configure its parameters: select the device that we will test, indicate the size of the file being written to the disk and what type of data will be contained in it?

On the left we see the usual chart-cardiogram of work, and below - the read and write speed indicators, as well as the number of input-output operations performed by the drive.

Compare the graph above, which was for an SSD hard drive with our terabyte:

Below is our “WD”.

Here, I think - there is nothing unexpected and this drive legally takes its honorable third place :) The winner, in all respects, is unconditionally an SSD from Plextor.

Since the article turned out to be quite voluminous anyway, I decided to divide it into two parts and about the shortcomings, general principles of functioning of solid-state drives based on flash memory, and my subjective feelings from using such a device, to talk to, which will soon appear on our website .

A short video on how SSDs are made: