Is it time for flash?

What is flash?  Flash memory is solid-state computer storage. 


USB Flash Drive

Most of us are use to the USB flash disk drives that quickly replaced the floppy disk drive many years ago.  Today, the price is often less than $1 per GB.

RAM memory was originally used in main computer memory, and many of us always compare number of GBs of main memory, number of CPUs and the clock speed, and number of GB (or TB) of hard disk storage when evaluating computer performance.   Solid state memory, by far the better performer, was expensive and therefore was, in the past, relegated to small, high-performance memory on a computer while the low-cost, much slower memory was on spinning magnetized disks.  I remember in the mid 1990s when 4MB of RAM was $400 and disk storage was $.25 per MB.

For the past few years we have seen little progress in increasing the clock speed of CPUs and to improve performance we add CPUs to a machine (dual, quad and 8-core CPUs are the norm today).  The bottleneck or slow point on most computers today is in the Input/Output when accessing data.  So the next leap in computer performance will be in accessing data.  Today, solid state memory is the next leap in overall computer performance.

Hard Disk Drive (HDD)

Without the slowness created by moving parts - such as hard disk drives (HDDs) which use a spinning platter to store data - solid-state drives (SSD), using solid-state memory chips deliver much better performance.  SSDs can read and write data much faster than hard drives with most workloads and they access the data much more quickly as well. Furthermore, solid state drives, with no moving parts are much less susceptible to handling damage even when impacted during use thereby making them much more reliable.

Solid State Disk (SSD)

Flash is starting to grow up (and by that, I mean it has become affordable).  It is now a realistic replacement for hard spinning drives.  SSD is still more expensive (ten to twenty times more than HDDs) but compared to the overall cost of a computer and with its higher performance, it is becoming more popular.  All the major players offer low capacity (256GB SSD) for personal computers.  Apple on one laptop model, the Mac Air, only offers SSDs.

Other major vendors (IBM, Dell, HP) are getting into SSD for servers.  IBM is pushing to get into the data centre by offering high performing SSD with 24TB capacity.  Flash drives use much less power than HDDs.  For some applications that use a lot of random data accesses, performance can be from 10 to 60 times better.  IT administrators will need to take the price performance of SSD into consideration in the data centre and to do this they need to compare cost per workload instead of cost per GB.

Has the tipping point arrived for SSD?