Solid State Drives (SSD): Low-power use, highly-reliable and high performance

New Solid State Drives (SSD) are starting to replace conventional disk drives. They use semi-conductor memory to store data. Importantly they contain no motors or moving parts and are characterized by much higher speed read/write access and reduced power consumption.

Because of the use of semi-conductor memory, SSD provide astonishingly high levels of random access performance compared with even top-end 15,000rpm disk drives. They benefit applications with high random access requirements such as databases.
In addition, with no motors or moving parts they have higher reliability than disk drives.
This means that SSD is ideal for Tier0 storage use. This improves storage layer optimization in systems that use Information Lifecycle Management (ILM). (Tier 1: Online disk drives, Tier 2: Nearline disk drives, Tier3: LTO Ultrium drives, archive)

The SSD used in ETERNUS

The SSD used in ETERNUS has enterprise class performance and reliability.
While maintaining compatibility with traditional disk drives, it allows low power operation at very high-speeds.
For concerns about flash memory rewrites, SSD in ETERNUS extends using Error Correcting Code (ECC [1]) and a wear leveling function[2].
In addition, data high-reliability is also protected by ECC inside the SSD.
If a power failure occurs SSD in ETERNUS can move any data in the volatile memory of the SSD (high-speed DRAM cache) to the flash memory and ensure a safe system halt.

  • [1]
    ECC (Error Correcting Code ): Redundant data added when requesting data in order to detect and correct errors in the original data.
  • [2]
    Wear leveling function: This function levels (or evenly distributes) the number of writes to flash memory. Typically continuous data write/delete deteriorates cells and ends up with no data written to the cells. The wear leveling function by eliminating wirte/delete concentration to a specific block avoids failures caused by SSD rewrites.

Product Requirements

Supported StoragesAll-Flash ArraysETERNUS AF150 S3
ETERNUS AF250 S3/S2, AF250
ETERNUS AF650 S3/S2, AF650
Hybrid Storage SystemsETERNUS DX100 S5/S4/S3, DX200 S5/S4/S3
ETERNUS DX500 S5/S4/S3, DX600 S5/S4/S3
ETERNUS DX900 S5
ETERNUS DX8700 S3/S2, DX8900 S4/S3
ETERNUS DX80 S2, DX90 S2
ETERNUS DX400 S2 series
  • *Note:
    Products/features/support content introduced on this page may be modified without notice.

Further Information

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