Solid State Disk And Flash Reliability Examined

By Neal Ekker is a vice president at Texas Memory Systems

Most enterprise data storage observers believe that solid state disks (SSD) will be main stream in data centers by 2012, with annual growth rate predictions exceeding 60%. Fueling this projected growth is the need for greater application performance and the move towards greener storage. Interestingly, at the same time that many analysts predict a dramatic expansion of the SSD market, they also observe that solid state storage may not be ready for mission critical enterprise deployment just yet, because of endurance and data integrity issues with Flash memory chips.

But Flash chips are not used in all SSD systems; the highest performance SSD utilizes the faster DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) instead. DRAM-based SSD offers the highest performance available for write and read operations and can dramatically accelerate both random and sequential operations. The chips are the same as those used in every server in every mission critical enterprise information system in the world. The majority of global telecommunications companies, the world's highest volume stock exchanges, many e-commerce sites, online games and gambling, sprawling ATM systems, high performance computing environments, and military applications all use DRAM-based SSD. These organizations choose DRAM SSD because of its high performance as well as its reliability. DRAM chips typically have much higher mean time between failure rates than mechanical storage. These SSD systems have been designed from the ground up to be highly reliable and ensure data integrity even in the event of component failures or disasters.