March 18, 2016 at 10:24Dear young! How SSDs have become the drives of the future
Habit is a corrosive thing. So while all the other computer components were changing externally or revolutionally shook up the architecture, the hard drives still looked like an advanced weapon of antiquity - a kind of bludgeon with GPS and a voice assistant for hunting mammoths. All the more surprising is that solid state drives replaced their predecessors and became popular only in the 21st century. Today we’ll figure out where they all came from to computers, and how we could transform from satellite pancakes to miniature, ultra-fast and only “right” storage devices.
At the dawn of the digital era, computers with abundant amounts of “moving” iron did not surprise anyone, if only because the computers of those years were the size of a cabinet, and the semiconductor industry was going through its childhood. And let us remember SSDs as a new-fangled component of a computer, already since the 1970s, engineers conjured over replacing slow and “defiantly mechanical” hard drives.
Just as a friend is in trouble - computer technology is first rolled around in the corporate segment, and only then get into large-scale equipment. One can envy the “damned capitalists” who will get cool innovations before the latter become available to the ordinary geek, but in the case of early SSD models, this pathos was fully justified - home computers were simply not able to “swing” the wildest expensive and fast drives, Unlike mainframes with specialized computing in large corporations.
Moreover, the SSDs themselves werealreadynot yet those - initially the term applied to any drive in which there were no moving parts. That is, long before the invention of flash memory, models consisting of several RAM modules instead of non-volatile components for storing data went on sale. A striking example is the world's first SSD “Bulk core” (1976!) Manufactured by Dataram Corporation: with 8 memory slots with a total volume of 2 MB, priced at $ 10 thousand (for this money you could buy about 7 Apple computers) and an elite brazier design .
The first SSDs were packed with RAM modules and looked like a barbecue
And nothing - no one was worried that such a drive was poorly suited for the end user. Scientists recorded on the ultrafast memory calculations that were demanding on the response speed, oil companies using advanced iron performed seismic studies, etc. True, the RAM drives did not differ in durability, and were connected to DEC and Data General workstations / servers through the Standard Disk Interconnect interface. Followers adhered to approximately the same concept, therefore corporate “gloom” reigned in the SSD camp.
SSDs first looked outside the business sector in 1982, when Axlon rolled out RAM Disk for Apple II home computers - as much as 320 KB of RAM memory with batteries for 3 hours of operation so as not to suddenly lose all this data. The novelty was worth almost more than the computer itself (about $ 1400). And all this stuff was connected to standard expansion slots and it was cleaner exotic than today RAID arrays from extreme class drives.
Axlon RAM Disk - a timid step SSD towards home PCs
SSDs began to acquire their modern look only in the mid-1990s. Flash memory, of course, was invented 10 years earlier, and Digipro Flashdisk, the first solid-state drive with innovative memory on board, got to the conveyor in 1989, offering 16 MB of memory for an IBM PC for some $ 5,000. A modern-sized SSD (3.5 inches, of course) was released only in 1995.
Digipro Flashdisk - NAND Comes to Solid State Drives
It is not surprising that SSDs "matured" for a very long time to the market price and support for modern interfaces. In corporate tasks, they, however, became fashionable gizmos - in the 1990s Digital Equipment Corporation released the completely modern 5.25-inch EZ5x models based on SCSI-1 and SCSI-2. Out of habit prices drove into shock (from $ 14 thousand for 107 MB to $ 135 thousand for 1 GB of memory), but business for that and business in order to recoup investments in hardware and other infrastructure.
And only since 2003, the first SSD's with the Parallel ATA, or IDE interface, came to light, to put it in common terms. As you can see, the expansion of ultrafast storage devices painfully started only at the beginning of the XXI century.
Solid-state drives became “their guys” after they acquired common connectors. For example, PATA
“Registration” in the country of dreams does not mean wonderful employment in it. And support for a common PC interface does not guarantee serious competition with hard drives. In the early 2000s, manufacturers rushed with SSDs exactly the same way as today, the creators of flexible matrices “just in case” bend smartphones and TVs in new model lines.
The market was as unprepared for fast drives with non-HDD operating principles as communal services were not ready on December 1 for winter, or a shy girl for the active development of events after a meeting with a guy. Buyers walked around and asked “what kind of flash drives are so expensive (over $ 200 for 512 MB in 2003, $ 700 for 32 GB in 2006), and how to fit the operating system on them?”. And the systems themselves (Windows XP and Vista for sure), in turn, did not know about these of your SSDs, so they shamelessly indexed and cached data, increasing the counter of write cycles and shortening the life of the drive.
The capacity of SSDs grew every year, but as a system drive, they were still unsuitable. Apple and Microsoft were in no hurry to implement full-scale support for new drives in their systems, although Linuxoids were able to mount the SSD cache a little earlier than users of other systems. However, in most cases the “self-service” system of the TRIM drive did not cause any joy.
But many of the accomplishments from the category of “well, finally!” Fall between 2000 and 2010. For example, the first SATA-SSD (1 Gb / s is no joke, comrade!) In 2004, or the first 2.5-inch laptops with 32 GB capacity in 2006 - around that time, SSDs reincarnated from expensive toys " Don’t cache the system ”in components suitable for everyday use.
2004 is the first SATA-SSD. True, not for user PCs and with prices up to $ 11,200 ...
At the same time, all kinds of standardization and elimination of “childhood diseases” of drives started. Starting with the predominance of several types of memory on the market (which we wrote about a little earlier) and continuing with the unification of drive interfaces - after many years when engineers made bicycles in their own way, thanks to Intel's efforts, most SSD manufacturers were puzzled by standardizing their models (eliminating compatibility problems and it’s high time to reduce development costs).
As a result, in 2006 a consortium of Intel-Micron, Hynix and Spectek “gave birth” to a universal interface for flash memory chips - ONFi (Open NAND Flash interface). The speed of ONFi 1.0 was a ridiculous 50 MB / s per channel, however, the modern ONFi 3.0 has already “cracked up” to 400 MB / s. But Samsung, Toshiba and SanDisk advocated creating a more suitable interface for their memory - Toggle Mode a year later. An alternative interface exists in two variations - Toggle Mode 1.0 (166 MB / s) and 2.0 (400 MB / s). What is curious is that the “archaic” versions of the interfaces were adopted in a short period between 2006 and 2007, and the latest revisions of the interfaces simultaneously entered the market in 2011.
Netbooks have turned SSDs into mass storage devices that are truly end-user-friendly
But all these innovations were aimed at a conscious choice of the buyer, who was still looking with greater enthusiasm at the growing volume of hard drives. Therefore, the "finest hour" for the SSD opened with a netbook boom - in 2007-2008, the tiny ASUS Eee PC 700 and 900 series flaunted solid-state drives instead of the HDD, and clearly showed that the laptop can do without a crunch of French rolls of parking heads and problems with impact resistance (netbooks are the most marching devices!). By the way, ASUS for its debut devices had to develop a special connector called Flash Connector - a kind of modification of MiniPCI-E in an era when only PATA and SATA existed for consumers. However, at the turn of 2009-2011, standardized miniature drives in the mSATA form factor came to the people,
ASUS was one of the first to teach SSDs to load operating systems into mass PCs. I had to pay for it with a kind of connector.
Another “bell” was the release of the first Apple computer with SSD (scandalously skinny and bold MacBook Air, if anyone forgot). From the original size of 1.8 inches and a modified SATA interface, the company moved to more compact analogs based on PCIe.
And in 2009, when buyers understood the essence of new drives, and these same SSDs grew to a sane capacity, the first Kingston drives burst into the market.
Apple MacBook Air - Solid State Drives Come to Elite Computer Technology
Since then, the SSD industry has experienced its heyday and has grown like yeast dough. And most importantly - gradually discards the legacy of mechanical drives.
One of the main problems of mass SSDs was the drop in drive speed as the amount of free space in it decreased. This is because SSDs “smear” the work with data into numerous blocks and pages, and work for reasons of equal wear and tear on all memory cells, and not in the way the file system bequeaths to them. Therefore, where the desired and useless file is adjacent, when the last one is deleted, its “neighbor” moves to a new cell, and the SSD controller clears the old “place of residence” decisively and completely - in the best tradition of demolishing illegal trading points.
But for such an intricate "migration" to be possible, the drive needs free space, but it does not always exist. In crowded conditions, the drive begins to settle its "tenants" not in neighboring blocks, but where it works. Accordingly, from the "overhead" falls and the speed of the SSD. Since then, it has become a tradition to leave at least 10% of the space not occupied on a solid-state drive in order to extend its service life and not lose in speed. And, although in modern models a decent amount of space is “bit off”, they are retrained to the service area already at the manufacturing stage, many users still leave part of the drive’s capacity unallocated for reinsurance.
After all available channels were used in the archaic parallel ATA (IDE) interface and all the speed was squeezed out, the drives (the hard drives in their overwhelming majority) moved to serial SATA, which with its AHCI protocol remarkably docked with floppy HDDs, but with solid state drives drives began to provoke delays in the execution of commands.
And even earlier, the question arose that the tribute to history is, of course, good, but it is high time for SSDs to stop “emulating” hard drives with dimensions, and it would be nice to reduce solid-state drives to dimensions acceptable for mobile technology.
No sooner said than done! In 2009, a compromise was born - miniature drives of the mSATA form factor, which, with a modest size, did not require the development of new protocols for interacting with SSDs and simply "lost weight" in comparison with their predecessors. Yes, the speed of such drives was limited by the capabilities of SATA-III, which got the edge on the enthusiasts, and the serial data transfer speed already began to run up to the real maximum (not 6 Gbit / s, but slightly more mundane digits) of the interface and threatened to become a “bottleneck” on the way of development SSD
mSATA was not a technical breakthrough, but the principle of “the same, butmore smaller” remarkably stuck in thin laptops
Was it possible to get around the limitations of SATA in the old days? In desktop computers - how it was! Drives based on the PCI-Express x2, x4, or x8 interface were completely ignited in high-speed systems at peak speeds of more than 1 GB / s.
However, the “bottleneck” in the form of SATA-III did not bother everyone, and the theory with numbers in the measurements of sequential write / read and a real increase in the responsiveness of the drives are two big differences. This is how to measure the steepness of a car by marking on a speedometer. Not many boys judged cars at the highest possible speed, but over time everyone understands that there are much more important things in vehicles. In short, for 4 years of vibrant life, mSATA has settled in most skinny and generally premium laptops, and sometimes tablets.
Before the introduction of the NVMe protocol, the fastest SSDs were a RAID array in an adapter for PCI-Express
It was still necessary to move on anyway, so since 2013 the latest history of SSDs has been made. The most modern and progressive format was born - M.2. He, in essence, is the “worthy son” of the usual PCI-Express: some drives of the “transition period” for desktops consisted of an SSD module in the M.2 form factor (with the classic AHCI protocol at the head), packed in a PCI Express adapter x2 2.0 / x4 2.0. Modern motherboards often do without such half measures and have a “native” connector for SSD in the M.2 form factor. For all other cases, you need to remember the three possible dimensions of such drives (80, 60 and 42 mm of the PCB length, respectively) and remember that the most progressive in terms of speed and minimum delay will be drives using the NVMe protocol,
SSD format M.2 - fashionable, stylish, productive
Now that we have figured out the stages of the formation of SSDs, it’s not a sin to delve into the principles of operation of such drives and evaluate how the filling of innovative computer components has evolved. Stay with us, and soon we will give you the "fried" iron facts under the easily digestible "sauce"!
To be continued, comrades!
Thanks for watching and stay with Kingston on the Guktime!
For more information on Kingston and HyperX products, visit the company's official website . A page with a visual aid will help you choose your HyperX kit .
At the dawn of the digital era, computers with abundant amounts of “moving” iron did not surprise anyone, if only because the computers of those years were the size of a cabinet, and the semiconductor industry was going through its childhood. And let us remember SSDs as a new-fangled component of a computer, already since the 1970s, engineers conjured over replacing slow and “defiantly mechanical” hard drives.
SSD in the 1970-1990s: mercilessly expensive exotic
Just as a friend is in trouble - computer technology is first rolled around in the corporate segment, and only then get into large-scale equipment. One can envy the “damned capitalists” who will get cool innovations before the latter become available to the ordinary geek, but in the case of early SSD models, this pathos was fully justified - home computers were simply not able to “swing” the wildest expensive and fast drives, Unlike mainframes with specialized computing in large corporations.
Moreover, the SSDs themselves were
The first SSDs were packed with RAM modules and looked like a barbecue
And nothing - no one was worried that such a drive was poorly suited for the end user. Scientists recorded on the ultrafast memory calculations that were demanding on the response speed, oil companies using advanced iron performed seismic studies, etc. True, the RAM drives did not differ in durability, and were connected to DEC and Data General workstations / servers through the Standard Disk Interconnect interface. Followers adhered to approximately the same concept, therefore corporate “gloom” reigned in the SSD camp.
SSDs first looked outside the business sector in 1982, when Axlon rolled out RAM Disk for Apple II home computers - as much as 320 KB of RAM memory with batteries for 3 hours of operation so as not to suddenly lose all this data. The novelty was worth almost more than the computer itself (about $ 1400). And all this stuff was connected to standard expansion slots and it was cleaner exotic than today RAID arrays from extreme class drives.
Axlon RAM Disk - a timid step SSD towards home PCs
SSDs began to acquire their modern look only in the mid-1990s. Flash memory, of course, was invented 10 years earlier, and Digipro Flashdisk, the first solid-state drive with innovative memory on board, got to the conveyor in 1989, offering 16 MB of memory for an IBM PC for some $ 5,000. A modern-sized SSD (3.5 inches, of course) was released only in 1995.
Digipro Flashdisk - NAND Comes to Solid State Drives
It is not surprising that SSDs "matured" for a very long time to the market price and support for modern interfaces. In corporate tasks, they, however, became fashionable gizmos - in the 1990s Digital Equipment Corporation released the completely modern 5.25-inch EZ5x models based on SCSI-1 and SCSI-2. Out of habit prices drove into shock (from $ 14 thousand for 107 MB to $ 135 thousand for 1 GB of memory), but business for that and business in order to recoup investments in hardware and other infrastructure.
And only since 2003, the first SSD's with the Parallel ATA, or IDE interface, came to light, to put it in common terms. As you can see, the expansion of ultrafast storage devices painfully started only at the beginning of the XXI century.
Solid-state drives became “their guys” after they acquired common connectors. For example, PATA
2000-2010. Tiny SSDs have come in retail. The first dose is paid
“Registration” in the country of dreams does not mean wonderful employment in it. And support for a common PC interface does not guarantee serious competition with hard drives. In the early 2000s, manufacturers rushed with SSDs exactly the same way as today, the creators of flexible matrices “just in case” bend smartphones and TVs in new model lines.
The market was as unprepared for fast drives with non-HDD operating principles as communal services were not ready on December 1 for winter, or a shy girl for the active development of events after a meeting with a guy. Buyers walked around and asked “what kind of flash drives are so expensive (over $ 200 for 512 MB in 2003, $ 700 for 32 GB in 2006), and how to fit the operating system on them?”. And the systems themselves (Windows XP and Vista for sure), in turn, did not know about these of your SSDs, so they shamelessly indexed and cached data, increasing the counter of write cycles and shortening the life of the drive.
The capacity of SSDs grew every year, but as a system drive, they were still unsuitable. Apple and Microsoft were in no hurry to implement full-scale support for new drives in their systems, although Linuxoids were able to mount the SSD cache a little earlier than users of other systems. However, in most cases the “self-service” system of the TRIM drive did not cause any joy.
But many of the accomplishments from the category of “well, finally!” Fall between 2000 and 2010. For example, the first SATA-SSD (1 Gb / s is no joke, comrade!) In 2004, or the first 2.5-inch laptops with 32 GB capacity in 2006 - around that time, SSDs reincarnated from expensive toys " Don’t cache the system ”in components suitable for everyday use.
2004 is the first SATA-SSD. True, not for user PCs and with prices up to $ 11,200 ...
At the same time, all kinds of standardization and elimination of “childhood diseases” of drives started. Starting with the predominance of several types of memory on the market (which we wrote about a little earlier) and continuing with the unification of drive interfaces - after many years when engineers made bicycles in their own way, thanks to Intel's efforts, most SSD manufacturers were puzzled by standardizing their models (eliminating compatibility problems and it’s high time to reduce development costs).
As a result, in 2006 a consortium of Intel-Micron, Hynix and Spectek “gave birth” to a universal interface for flash memory chips - ONFi (Open NAND Flash interface). The speed of ONFi 1.0 was a ridiculous 50 MB / s per channel, however, the modern ONFi 3.0 has already “cracked up” to 400 MB / s. But Samsung, Toshiba and SanDisk advocated creating a more suitable interface for their memory - Toggle Mode a year later. An alternative interface exists in two variations - Toggle Mode 1.0 (166 MB / s) and 2.0 (400 MB / s). What is curious is that the “archaic” versions of the interfaces were adopted in a short period between 2006 and 2007, and the latest revisions of the interfaces simultaneously entered the market in 2011.
Netbooks have turned SSDs into mass storage devices that are truly end-user-friendly
But all these innovations were aimed at a conscious choice of the buyer, who was still looking with greater enthusiasm at the growing volume of hard drives. Therefore, the "finest hour" for the SSD opened with a netbook boom - in 2007-2008, the tiny ASUS Eee PC 700 and 900 series flaunted solid-state drives instead of the HDD, and clearly showed that the laptop can do without a crunch of French rolls of parking heads and problems with impact resistance (netbooks are the most marching devices!). By the way, ASUS for its debut devices had to develop a special connector called Flash Connector - a kind of modification of MiniPCI-E in an era when only PATA and SATA existed for consumers. However, at the turn of 2009-2011, standardized miniature drives in the mSATA form factor came to the people,
ASUS was one of the first to teach SSDs to load operating systems into mass PCs. I had to pay for it with a kind of connector.
Another “bell” was the release of the first Apple computer with SSD (scandalously skinny and bold MacBook Air, if anyone forgot). From the original size of 1.8 inches and a modified SATA interface, the company moved to more compact analogs based on PCIe.
And in 2009, when buyers understood the essence of new drives, and these same SSDs grew to a sane capacity, the first Kingston drives burst into the market.
Apple MacBook Air - Solid State Drives Come to Elite Computer Technology
2010-2016. Not luxury, but the most massive drives
Since then, the SSD industry has experienced its heyday and has grown like yeast dough. And most importantly - gradually discards the legacy of mechanical drives.
One of the main problems of mass SSDs was the drop in drive speed as the amount of free space in it decreased. This is because SSDs “smear” the work with data into numerous blocks and pages, and work for reasons of equal wear and tear on all memory cells, and not in the way the file system bequeaths to them. Therefore, where the desired and useless file is adjacent, when the last one is deleted, its “neighbor” moves to a new cell, and the SSD controller clears the old “place of residence” decisively and completely - in the best tradition of demolishing illegal trading points.
But for such an intricate "migration" to be possible, the drive needs free space, but it does not always exist. In crowded conditions, the drive begins to settle its "tenants" not in neighboring blocks, but where it works. Accordingly, from the "overhead" falls and the speed of the SSD. Since then, it has become a tradition to leave at least 10% of the space not occupied on a solid-state drive in order to extend its service life and not lose in speed. And, although in modern models a decent amount of space is “bit off”, they are retrained to the service area already at the manufacturing stage, many users still leave part of the drive’s capacity unallocated for reinsurance.
After all available channels were used in the archaic parallel ATA (IDE) interface and all the speed was squeezed out, the drives (the hard drives in their overwhelming majority) moved to serial SATA, which with its AHCI protocol remarkably docked with floppy HDDs, but with solid state drives drives began to provoke delays in the execution of commands.
And even earlier, the question arose that the tribute to history is, of course, good, but it is high time for SSDs to stop “emulating” hard drives with dimensions, and it would be nice to reduce solid-state drives to dimensions acceptable for mobile technology.
No sooner said than done! In 2009, a compromise was born - miniature drives of the mSATA form factor, which, with a modest size, did not require the development of new protocols for interacting with SSDs and simply "lost weight" in comparison with their predecessors. Yes, the speed of such drives was limited by the capabilities of SATA-III, which got the edge on the enthusiasts, and the serial data transfer speed already began to run up to the real maximum (not 6 Gbit / s, but slightly more mundane digits) of the interface and threatened to become a “bottleneck” on the way of development SSD
mSATA was not a technical breakthrough, but the principle of “the same, but
Was it possible to get around the limitations of SATA in the old days? In desktop computers - how it was! Drives based on the PCI-Express x2, x4, or x8 interface were completely ignited in high-speed systems at peak speeds of more than 1 GB / s.
However, the “bottleneck” in the form of SATA-III did not bother everyone, and the theory with numbers in the measurements of sequential write / read and a real increase in the responsiveness of the drives are two big differences. This is how to measure the steepness of a car by marking on a speedometer. Not many boys judged cars at the highest possible speed, but over time everyone understands that there are much more important things in vehicles. In short, for 4 years of vibrant life, mSATA has settled in most skinny and generally premium laptops, and sometimes tablets.
Before the introduction of the NVMe protocol, the fastest SSDs were a RAID array in an adapter for PCI-Express
It was still necessary to move on anyway, so since 2013 the latest history of SSDs has been made. The most modern and progressive format was born - M.2. He, in essence, is the “worthy son” of the usual PCI-Express: some drives of the “transition period” for desktops consisted of an SSD module in the M.2 form factor (with the classic AHCI protocol at the head), packed in a PCI Express adapter x2 2.0 / x4 2.0. Modern motherboards often do without such half measures and have a “native” connector for SSD in the M.2 form factor. For all other cases, you need to remember the three possible dimensions of such drives (80, 60 and 42 mm of the PCB length, respectively) and remember that the most progressive in terms of speed and minimum delay will be drives using the NVMe protocol,
SSD format M.2 - fashionable, stylish, productive
Where are the materiel and chilling details?
Now that we have figured out the stages of the formation of SSDs, it’s not a sin to delve into the principles of operation of such drives and evaluate how the filling of innovative computer components has evolved. Stay with us, and soon we will give you the "fried" iron facts under the easily digestible "sauce"!
To be continued, comrades!
Thanks for watching and stay with Kingston on the Guktime!
For more information on Kingston and HyperX products, visit the company's official website . A page with a visual aid will help you choose your HyperX kit .
