SSD Storage

Solid State Drives: Incredible speed + mind-blowing performance = WOW. We love Solid State Drives, also known as SSDs. They are flash-based storage devices. Once you try one, or an entire RAID set of them, there’s just no going back to Hard Drive Disks! What SSDs lack in raw storage space they more than make up for in the following areas.

Speed, speed, speed.

These drives are off the charts when it comes to read and write times (kickin’ database server, anyone?) They can manage xxx.xx MB/s in effective reads and access time 0.044ms. With no “spin-up” time required, applications launch almost instantly, boot times are drastically reduced, and any sort of data-intensive application gains an immediate and noticeable performance boost. Get your SSDs now – there is a significant risk that the FDA will soon classify them as “addiction-inducing” devices.

The graph below demonstrates the performance of a traditional Western Digital 500GB hard drive. The blue line is the transfer rate, where the higher the number, the better. The yellow dots are the access time, where the lower number is better. As you can see in the graph below, performance degrades over the 4 minute test. The transfer rate decreases while the access time increases. This is true of all Hard Disk Drives.

The next graph below is our newCrucial 128GB Solid State Drive (SSD). Notice that the performance NEVER degrades, the Data Transfer Rate stays steady with an average of 511.6 MB/s vs xxx.xx MB/s, and the seek time is 0.044ms!

The WD 500GB HDD takes 4.4ms to access data, whereas the SSD takes only 0.044! That is an increase of 10,000%! It is almost like adding128GB of RAM to your server because a Solid State Drive is a “Flash Drive,” which is essentially RAM instead of a spinning disk.

A quick review of the comparison chart below will show you that the average read speed is xxx.xx% faster. Disk I/O no longer has to be your bottleneck.

Solid State Drive vs. Hard Disk Drive
	WD 500GBvHDD	Crucial 128GB SSD	Performance Increase
Access Time *lower is better	4.4ms	0.044ms	10,000 %
Read Transfer Rates *higher is better
Minimum (MB/sec)	xxx	314.7	xxx %
Maximum (MB/sec)	xxx	518.3	xxx %
Average (MB/sec)	xxx	511.6	xxx %
Write Transfer Rates *higher is better
Minimum (MB/sec)	65.9	188.7	286.34 %
Maximum (MB/sec)	134.6	200.9	149.26 %
Average (MB/sec)	108.7	197.2	181.42 %

Efficiency

Not only are SSDs completely silent, but they have far lower power requirements than standard hard drives. This makes data center operators very happy.

Reliability

These drives are absolutely ideal for mobile applications like laptops, but they work incredibly well in servers, too. Anyone who has experienced a hard drive crash will appreciate the security that accompanies a solid state drive that has no moving parts to break or wear out.

Less chance of mechanical failure = secure data = happy customer = happy CARI.net.

Want SSD? We’ve got it. You’ll like it. We guarantee that!