The SSD Relapse: Understanding and Choosing the Best SSD
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 30, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
A Quick Flash Refresher
DRAM is very fast. Writes happen in nanoseconds as do CPU clock cycles, those two get along very well. The problem with DRAM is that it's volatile storage; if the charge stored in each DRAM cell isn't refreshed, it's lost. Pull the plug and whatever you stored in DRAM will eventually disappear (and unlike most other changes, eventually happens in fractions of a second).
Magnetic storage, on the other hand, is not very fast. It's faster than writing trillions of numbers down on paper, but compared to DRAM it plain sucks. For starters, magnetic disk storage is mechanical - things have to physically move to read and write. Now it's impressive how fast these things can move and how accurate and relatively reliable they are given their complexity, but to a CPU, they are slow.
The fastest consumer hard drives take 7 milliseconds to read data off of a platter. The fastest consumer CPUs can do something with that data in one hundred thousandth that time.
The only reason we put up with mechanical storage (HDDs) is because they are cheap, store tons of data and are non-volatile: the data is still there even when you turn em off.
NAND flash gives us the best of both worlds. They are effectively non-volatile (flash cells can lose their charge but after about a decade) and relatively fast (data accesses take microseconds, not milliseconds). Through electron tunneling a charge is inserted into an N-channel MOSFET. Once the charge is in there, it's there for good - no refreshing necessary.
N-Channel MOSFET. One per bit in a NAND flash chip.
One MOSFET is good for one bit. Group billions of these MOSFETs together, in silicon, and you've got a multi-gigabyte NAND flash chip.
The MOSFETs are organized into lines, and the lines into groups called pages. These days a page is usually 4KB in size. NAND flash can't be written to one bit at a time, it's written at the page level - so 4KB at a time. Once you write the data though, it's there for good. Erasing is a bit more complicated.
To coax the charge out of the MOSFETs requires a bit more effort and the way NAND flash works is that you can't discharge a single MOSFET, you have to erase in larger groups called blocks. NAND blocks are commonly 128 pages, that means if you want to re-write a page in flash you have to first erase it and all 127 adjacent pages first. And allow me to repeat myself: if you want to overwrite 4KB of data from a full block, you need to erase and re-write 512KB of data.
To make matters worse, every time you write to a flash page you reduce its lifespan. The JEDEC spec for MLC (multi-level cell) flash is 10,000 writes before the flash can start to fail.
Dealing with all of these issues requires that controllers get very crafty with how they manage writes. A good controller must split writes up among as many flash channels as possible, while avoiding writing to the same pages over and over again. It must also deal with the fact that some data is going to get frequently updated while others will remain stagnant for days, weeks, months or even years. It has to detect all of this and organize the drive in real time without knowing anything about how it is you're using your computer.
It's a tough job.
But not impossible.
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Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
wow I misspelled my own name :) Time to sleep for real this time :)Take care,
Anand
IntelUser2000 - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
Looking at pure max TDP and idle power numbers and concluding the power consumption based on those figures are wrong.Look here: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets...px?i=3403&a...">http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets...px?i=3403&a...
Modern drives quickly reach idle even between times where the user don't even know and at "load". Faster drives will reach lower average power because it'll work faster to get to idle. This is why initial battery life tests showed X25-M with much higher active/idle power figures got better battery life than Samsungs with less active/idle power.
Max power is important, but unless you are running that app 24/7 its not real at all, especially the max power benchmarks are designed to reach close to TDP as possible.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
I agree, it's more than just max power consumption. I tried to point that out with the last paragraph on the page:"As I alluded to before, the much higher performance of these drives than a traditional hard drive means that they spend much more time at an idle power state. The Seagate Momentus 5400.6 has roughly the same power characteristics of these two drives, but they outperform the Seagate by a factor of at least 16x. In other words, a good SSD delivers an order of magnitude better performance per watt than even a very efficient hard drive."
I didn't have time to run through some notebook tests to look at impact on battery life but it's something I plan to do in the future.
Take care,
Anand
IntelUser2000 - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
Thanks, people pay too much attention to just the max TDP and idle power alone. Properly done, no real apps should ever reach max TDP for 100% of the duration its running at.cristis - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
page 6: "So we’re at approximately 36 days before I exhaust one out of my ~10,000 write cycles. Multiply that out and it would take 36,000 days" --- wait, isn't that 360,000 days = 986 years?Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
woops, you're right :) Either way your flash will give out in about 10 years and perfectly wear leveled drives with no write amplification aren't possible regardless.Take care,
Anand
cdillon - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
I gather that you're saying it'll give out after 10 years because a flash cell will lose its stored charge after about 10 years, not because the write-life will be surpassed after 10 years, which doesn't seem to be the case. The 10-year charge life doesn't mean they become useless after 10 years, just that you need to refresh the data before the charge is lost. This makes flash less useful for data archival purposes, but for regular use, who doesn't re-format their system (and thus re-write 100% of the data) at least once every 10 years? :-)Zheos - Monday, August 31, 2009 - link
"This makes flash less useful for data archival purposes, but for regular use, who doesn't re-format their system (and thus re-write 100% of the data) at least once every 10 years? :-)"I would like an input on that too, cuz thats a bit confusing.
GourdFreeMan - Tuesday, September 1, 2009 - link
Thermal energy (i.e. heat) allows the electrons trapped in the floating gate to overcome the potential well and escape, causing zeros (represented by a larger concentration of electrons in the floating gate) to eventually become ones (represented by a smaller concentration of electrons in the floating gate). Most SLC flash is rated at about 10 years of data retention at either 20C (68F) or 25C (77F). What Anand doesn't mention is that as a rule of thumb for every 9 degrees C (~16F) that the temperature is raised above that point, data retention lifespan is halved. (This rule of thumb only holds for human habitable temperatures... the exact relation is governed by the Arrhenius equation.)Wear leveling and error correction codes can be employed to mitigate this problem, which only gets worse as you try to store more bits per cell or use a smaller lithography process without changing materials or design.
Zheos - Tuesday, September 1, 2009 - link
Thank you GourdFreeMan for the additional input,But, if we format like every year or so , doesnt the countdown on data retention restart from 0 ? or after ~10 year (seems too be less if like you said temperature affect it) the SSD will not only fail at times but become unusable ? Or if we come to that point a format/reinstall would resolve the problem ?
I dont care about losing data stored after 10 years, what i do care is if the drive become ASSURELY unsusable after 10 year maximum. For drives that comes at a premium price, i don't like this if its the case.