Wave Systems Corp. (fka WAVXQ)

[Fullmoon]

Solid State Drives: High Speed for the Enterprise

http://pr-canada.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=87413&Itemid=65

Solid state drives (SSDs -- also known as flash drives) are the latest major innovation in computing. Coming to the rescue of sites the world over that have been tied to agonizingly slow mechanical drives since the advent of modern computing, solid state drives bring a level of data transfer rates close those of CPU and memory.
Since the broad availability of solid state drives several years ago, they have been taken up by the early adopters and high-end PC users. Because of the considerable cost differential between solid state drives and hard drives, enterprises have been waiting for prices to come down before broad implementation. But now that is occurring -- solid state drive pricing is expected to equal that of hard disks before very long -- and one company, Sun Microsystems, is now offering solid state drive options for some of their high-end servers.

To make sure that a company will truly benefit from the inclusion of solid state drives thereby justifying the extra cost, Sun is offering a free download called the Sun Flash Analyzer. This utility identifies databases and other applications that can really benefit from SSDs' high throughput and faster response times, and also makes recommendations about methods of increasing system performance.

As corporations begin adopting SSDs, there is one other measure they will need to take, however: the inclusion of a utility to optimize free space on each drive. NTFS -- the file system found in all of Microsoft's current operating systems -- saves files to solid state drives in such a way that free space is shattered into pieces. This is because NTFS is designed for saving data onto hard drives, not solid state drives. As a result, write performance slows dramatically and within a month can degrade by as much as 80 percent.

Solid state drives also have a limited number of erase-write cycles, and the breaking up of free space increases the number of such cycles. Hence, drive life is shortened considerably.

To ensure that solid state drives provide the performance required by an enterprise, a solution must be employed that optimizes their free space. When this is done, write performance is brought back to a high-speed level and kept there. Once the solution has been in operation a short time, write-erase activity becomes substantially reduced. The life of the drive is lengthened and performance is maximized.

It is evident that we are on the brink of a paradigm shift with enterprise storage technology. Companies can ensure the transition is smooth -- and all performance benefits are realized -- by addressing this free space issue with each drive before it becomes a problem.