Dear young! How SSD turned into drives of the future
Habit is a corrosive thing. So far, all the other components of computers have changed externally or revolutionally shaken up the architecture, the hard drives still resembled an improved weapon of antiquity - a kind of cudgel with GPS and voice assistant for the hunt for mammoths. All the more surprising that solid-state drives have replaced their predecessors and became popular only in the XXI century. Today, we will figure out where they came from in general to computers, and how they were able to reincarnate from satellites of tarakhtelok with pancakes into miniature, super-fast and the only “right” storage devices.
At the dawn of the digital era, computers with copious amounts of "rolling" iron did not surprise anyone - at least 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 SSD as a new-fashioned computer component, already from the 1970s, engineers conjured over the replacement of sluggish and “defiantly mechanical” hard drives.
')
Just as a friend is known in trouble - computer technologies are first run in the corporate segment, and only then get into high-volume equipment. One can envy the “damned capitalists” who get cool innovations before the latter becomes available to the ordinary geek, but in the case of early SSD models, such pathos was completely justified - home computers were simply not able to “swing” the wildest expensive and fast drives in Unlike mainframes with specialized computing in large corporations.
Especially since the SSDs themselves werealready not the same - the term originally referred 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 data storage components went on sale. A vivid example is the first in the world SSD “Bulk core” (1976!) Produced by Dataram Corporation: with 8 memory bars with a total volume of 2 MB, priced at about $ 10 thousand (approximately 7 Apple computers could be bought with this money) and an elite barbecue design .
The first SSDs were packed with RAM modules and resembled a kebab house.
And nothing - no one worried that such a drive was poorly suited for the end user. Scientists have fixed on the ultra-fast memory demanding to the speed of the response of the calculation, the oil companies with the help of advanced iron conducted seismic studies, etc. True, the durability of the RAM-drives did not differ, and were connected to the workstations / servers DEC and Data General through the interface Standard Disk Interconnect. The followers adhered to the same concept, therefore in the SSD camp there reigned corporate “darkness” far from the consumer market.
For the first time, solid-state drives looked out of the business sector in 1982, when Axlon rolled out the RAM Disk for Apple II home computers — as many as 320 KB of RAM-based memory with 3-hour batteries, in order not to lose all this data. The novelty cost almost more than the computer itself (about $ 1,400). And all this stuff was connected to standard expansion slots and it was exotic cleaner than today RAID arrays from extreme class drives.
Axlon RAM Disk - a shy step SSD in the direction of home PCs
SSD began to acquire its 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, reached the conveyor in 1989, offering 16 MB of memory for an IBM PC for some $ 5000. A modern-size SSD (3.5 inches, certainly) was released in the series only in 1995.
Digipro Flashdisk - NAND Came to Solid State Drives
It is not surprising that the solid-state drives for a very long time "matured" to the market price and support for modern interfaces. In corporate tasks, they, however, became fashionable gizmos - in the 1990s, Digital Equipment Corporation already released completely modern 5.25-inch EZ5x models based on SCSI-1 and SCSI-2. Unusual prices plunged into shock (from $ 14,000 for 107 MB to $ 135,000 for 1 GB of memory), but the business is a business to pay back investments in hardware and other infrastructure.
And only since 2003, the first SSD's with the Parallel ATA interface, or IDE, have been published, to use common terms. As you can see, the expansion of ultrafast storage devices painfully started only at the beginning of the XXI century.
"His guys" solid-state drives have become after they got common connectors. For example, PATA
"Registration" in the country of dreams does not mean a great job in it. And the support of a common PC interface does not guarantee a serious competition with hard drives. In the early 2000s, manufacturers wore with solid-state drives exactly the same way as today the creators of flexible “just in case” matrices bend smartphones and TVs in new model lines.
The market was not as ready for fast drives with non-HDD principles of operation as the utility workers are not ready for winter on December 1, or a shy girl for an active development after meeting a guy. Buyers went around and 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 can they accommodate the operating system?”. Yes, and the systems themselves (Windows XP and Vista so precisely), in turn, did not know about these SSDs of yours, so they shamelessly indexed-cached data, increasing the cycle count of records and thereby shortening the drive's life.
SSD capacity has grown every year, but as a system drive, they were not yet fit. Apple and Microsoft were not in a hurry to implement full-scale support for new drives into their systems, although Linux users had the opportunity to mount the SSD cache a little earlier than users of other systems. However, the “self-service” system of the TRIM drive, which is not working in most cases, did not cause joy to anyone.
But many achievements from the category of “well, finally!” Fall in the period between 2000 and 2010. For example, the first SATA-SSD (1 Gb / s is not a joke, comrade!) In 2004, or the first 2.5-inch notebook-like SSD with a capacity of 32 GB in 2006 - approximately then solid-state drives reincarnated from expensive toys Do not sew the system cache "in suitable for everyday use components.
2004 - the first SATA-SSD. True, not for custom PCs and with a price of up to $ 11,200 ...
At the same time, all sorts of standardization and elimination of “childhood diseases” of the drives started. Starting with the prevalence of several types of memory on the market (which we wrote a little earlier) and continuing to unify the interfaces of drives - after many years, when engineers “used bicycles” in their own way, most of the SSD manufacturers were puzzled by the standardization of their models (eliminate compatibility problems and reduce development costs was long overdue).
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, but the modern ONFi 3.0 has ricketyed up to 400 MB / s. But Samsung, Toshiba and SanDisk were in favor of creating a more suitable interface to their memory - Toggle Mode a year later. 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 taken in the short interval between 2006 and 2007, and the newest revisions of the interfaces simultaneously entered the market in 2011.
Netbooks have turned SSDs into truly massive and useful for the end customer drives
But all these innovations were aimed at the deliberate choice of the buyer, who was still looking with great enthusiasm at the hard drives growing in volumes. Therefore, the “star hour” for SSD opened along with the netbook boom - in 2007-2008, the tiny ASUS Eee PC 700 and 900 series flaunted solid state drives instead of HDD, and clearly showed that the laptop can do without the crunch of a French roll of parking heads and problems with impact resistance (netbooks are the most hiking devices!). By the way, ASUS for its debut devices had to develop a special connector called the Flash Connector - a kind of MiniPCI-E modification 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 went to the people, which enthusiasts gladly “collective farm” for compatibility with their netbooks - the connector developed by ASUS differed slightly and several cut contacts turned the drive into an Eee PC compatible model.
ASUS was one of the first to teach SSD to load operating systems into mass PCs. Pay for it had a kind of connector
Another "bell" was the release of the first Apple computer with SSD (scandalously skinny and brave MacBook Air, if anyone forgot). From the original size of 1.8 inches and a modified SATA interface, the company has moved to more compact PCIe-based counterparts.
And in 2009, when buyers understood the essence of the new drives, and these same SSDs had grown to sane capacity, the first Kingston drives broke into the market.
Apple MacBook Air - solid-state drives come to elite computer equipment
Since then, the SSD industry has experienced its heyday and is growing like yeast dough. And most importantly - gradually discarding the legacy of mechanical disks.
One of the main problems of massive SSDs was a drop in the speed of the drive as the amount of free space decreased in it. This is because solid-state drives “smear” the work with data into multiple blocks and pages, and work for the sake of equal wear of all memory cells, and not in the way the file system beats them. Therefore, where the necessary and useless file is adjacent, when the last file is deleted, its “neighbor” moves to a new cell, and the old “place of residence” SSD controller decisively and completely cleans in the best traditions of the demolition of illegal trade points.
But in order for such an intricate “migration” to be possible, the drive needs free space, but it is not always there. In conditions of tightness, the drive begins to settle its "tenants" not into neighboring blocks, but where it will turn out. 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 place on a solid-state drive not occupied, in order to prolong its service life and not lose in speed. And, although in modern models a decent amount of space is “bitten off” in the service area already at the manufacturing stage, many users still leave part of the storage capacity of the drive unmarked for reinsurance.
After all available channels were involved in the archaic parallel ATA (IDE) interface and all the speed was squeezed out, the drives (most of the hard drives) moved to serial SATA, which with its AHCI protocol remarkably docked with sluggish HDD, but with solid-state drives began to provoke delays in the execution of commands.
And even before the question arose that the tribute to history is, of course, good, but the SSD is long overdue to “emulate” hard drives with dimensions, and it would be good to reduce SSDs to dimensions acceptable for mobile technology.
No sooner said than done! In 2009, a compromise version was born - miniature drives of the mSATA form factor, which, with modest dimensions, did not require the development of new protocols for interaction with SSDs and simply “effectively lost weight” in comparison with their predecessors. Yes, the speed of operation of such drives was limited by the capabilities of the SATA-III, which has overwhelmed enthusiasts, and the speed of serial data transmission has already started to rest against the real maximum (not 6 Gbit / s, but slightly more mundane numbers) of the interface and threatened to become a bottleneck SSD.
mSATA was not a technical breakthrough, but the principle of “the same soup, but alittle more smaller” remarkably caught on in thin notebooks
Was it possible to get around the limitations of SATA in the olden days? In desktop computers - as it was! Drives based on the PCI-Express x2, x4 or x8 interface were fully ignited in high-speed systems at peak speeds above 1 GB / s.
However, the "bottleneck" in the form of SATA-III annoyed not everyone, but the theory with numbers in the sequential write / read measurements and the real increase in the responsiveness of the drives are two big differences. This is how to measure the slope of the car on the markings on the speedometer. Not only what boy didn’t judge cars at the maximum possible speed, but over time everyone understands that there are much more important things in vehicles. In short, for 4 years of bright life, mSATA has settled in most of the skinny and generally premium laptops, and sometimes tablets.
Prior to the implementation of the NVMe protocol, the fastest SSDs were a RAID array in a PCI-Express adapter
Just move on was still necessary, so since 2013, the newest history of SSD has been decided. The most modern and progressive format was born - M.2. It is, in its essence, the “worthy son” of the familiar PCI-Express: some “transitional” drives for desktops consisted of an SSD module in 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 dispense with such half-measures and have a “native” connector for SSD in the form factor M.2. For all other cases, you need to remember 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 delays will be drives using the NVMe protocol, which replaced the ones developed for hard drives AHCI.
SSD format M.2 - fashionable, stylish, productive
Now that we have understood the stages of the formation of an SSD, it is not a sin to delve into the principles of operation of such drives and evaluate how the filling of innovative computer components has developed. Stay with us, and soon we will give you the "fried" iron facts under an easily digestible "sauce"!
To be continued, comrades!
Thank you for your attention and stay with Kingston on Hiktatimes!
For more information about Kingston and HyperX products, visit the company's official website . In choosing your kit HyperX help page with visual aids .
At the dawn of the digital era, computers with copious amounts of "rolling" iron did not surprise anyone - at least 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 SSD as a new-fashioned computer component, already from the 1970s, engineers conjured over the replacement of sluggish and “defiantly mechanical” hard drives.
')
SSD in the 1970-1990s: Expensive Exotic Ruthlessly
Just as a friend is known in trouble - computer technologies are first run in the corporate segment, and only then get into high-volume equipment. One can envy the “damned capitalists” who get cool innovations before the latter becomes available to the ordinary geek, but in the case of early SSD models, such pathos was completely justified - home computers were simply not able to “swing” the wildest expensive and fast drives in Unlike mainframes with specialized computing in large corporations.
Especially since the SSDs themselves were
The first SSDs were packed with RAM modules and resembled a kebab house.
And nothing - no one worried that such a drive was poorly suited for the end user. Scientists have fixed on the ultra-fast memory demanding to the speed of the response of the calculation, the oil companies with the help of advanced iron conducted seismic studies, etc. True, the durability of the RAM-drives did not differ, and were connected to the workstations / servers DEC and Data General through the interface Standard Disk Interconnect. The followers adhered to the same concept, therefore in the SSD camp there reigned corporate “darkness” far from the consumer market.
For the first time, solid-state drives looked out of the business sector in 1982, when Axlon rolled out the RAM Disk for Apple II home computers — as many as 320 KB of RAM-based memory with 3-hour batteries, in order not to lose all this data. The novelty cost almost more than the computer itself (about $ 1,400). And all this stuff was connected to standard expansion slots and it was exotic cleaner than today RAID arrays from extreme class drives.
Axlon RAM Disk - a shy step SSD in the direction of home PCs
SSD began to acquire its 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, reached the conveyor in 1989, offering 16 MB of memory for an IBM PC for some $ 5000. A modern-size SSD (3.5 inches, certainly) was released in the series only in 1995.
Digipro Flashdisk - NAND Came to Solid State Drives
It is not surprising that the solid-state drives for a very long time "matured" to the market price and support for modern interfaces. In corporate tasks, they, however, became fashionable gizmos - in the 1990s, Digital Equipment Corporation already released completely modern 5.25-inch EZ5x models based on SCSI-1 and SCSI-2. Unusual prices plunged into shock (from $ 14,000 for 107 MB to $ 135,000 for 1 GB of memory), but the business is a business to pay back investments in hardware and other infrastructure.
And only since 2003, the first SSD's with the Parallel ATA interface, or IDE, have been published, to use common terms. As you can see, the expansion of ultrafast storage devices painfully started only at the beginning of the XXI century.
"His guys" solid-state drives have become after they got common connectors. For example, PATA
2000-2010. Tiny SSDs come in retail. The first dose is charged
"Registration" in the country of dreams does not mean a great job in it. And the support of a common PC interface does not guarantee a serious competition with hard drives. In the early 2000s, manufacturers wore with solid-state drives exactly the same way as today the creators of flexible “just in case” matrices bend smartphones and TVs in new model lines.
The market was not as ready for fast drives with non-HDD principles of operation as the utility workers are not ready for winter on December 1, or a shy girl for an active development after meeting a guy. Buyers went around and 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 can they accommodate the operating system?”. Yes, and the systems themselves (Windows XP and Vista so precisely), in turn, did not know about these SSDs of yours, so they shamelessly indexed-cached data, increasing the cycle count of records and thereby shortening the drive's life.
SSD capacity has grown every year, but as a system drive, they were not yet fit. Apple and Microsoft were not in a hurry to implement full-scale support for new drives into their systems, although Linux users had the opportunity to mount the SSD cache a little earlier than users of other systems. However, the “self-service” system of the TRIM drive, which is not working in most cases, did not cause joy to anyone.
But many achievements from the category of “well, finally!” Fall in the period between 2000 and 2010. For example, the first SATA-SSD (1 Gb / s is not a joke, comrade!) In 2004, or the first 2.5-inch notebook-like SSD with a capacity of 32 GB in 2006 - approximately then solid-state drives reincarnated from expensive toys Do not sew the system cache "in suitable for everyday use components.
2004 - the first SATA-SSD. True, not for custom PCs and with a price of up to $ 11,200 ...
At the same time, all sorts of standardization and elimination of “childhood diseases” of the drives started. Starting with the prevalence of several types of memory on the market (which we wrote a little earlier) and continuing to unify the interfaces of drives - after many years, when engineers “used bicycles” in their own way, most of the SSD manufacturers were puzzled by the standardization of their models (eliminate compatibility problems and reduce development costs was long overdue).
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, but the modern ONFi 3.0 has ricketyed up to 400 MB / s. But Samsung, Toshiba and SanDisk were in favor of creating a more suitable interface to their memory - Toggle Mode a year later. 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 taken in the short interval between 2006 and 2007, and the newest revisions of the interfaces simultaneously entered the market in 2011.
Netbooks have turned SSDs into truly massive and useful for the end customer drives
But all these innovations were aimed at the deliberate choice of the buyer, who was still looking with great enthusiasm at the hard drives growing in volumes. Therefore, the “star hour” for SSD opened along with the netbook boom - in 2007-2008, the tiny ASUS Eee PC 700 and 900 series flaunted solid state drives instead of HDD, and clearly showed that the laptop can do without the crunch of a French roll of parking heads and problems with impact resistance (netbooks are the most hiking devices!). By the way, ASUS for its debut devices had to develop a special connector called the Flash Connector - a kind of MiniPCI-E modification 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 went to the people, which enthusiasts gladly “collective farm” for compatibility with their netbooks - the connector developed by ASUS differed slightly and several cut contacts turned the drive into an Eee PC compatible model.
ASUS was one of the first to teach SSD to load operating systems into mass PCs. Pay for it had a kind of connector
Another "bell" was the release of the first Apple computer with SSD (scandalously skinny and brave MacBook Air, if anyone forgot). From the original size of 1.8 inches and a modified SATA interface, the company has moved to more compact PCIe-based counterparts.
And in 2009, when buyers understood the essence of the new drives, and these same SSDs had grown to sane capacity, the first Kingston drives broke into the market.
Apple MacBook Air - solid-state drives come to elite computer equipment
2010-2016. Not luxury, but the most massive drives
Since then, the SSD industry has experienced its heyday and is growing like yeast dough. And most importantly - gradually discarding the legacy of mechanical disks.
One of the main problems of massive SSDs was a drop in the speed of the drive as the amount of free space decreased in it. This is because solid-state drives “smear” the work with data into multiple blocks and pages, and work for the sake of equal wear of all memory cells, and not in the way the file system beats them. Therefore, where the necessary and useless file is adjacent, when the last file is deleted, its “neighbor” moves to a new cell, and the old “place of residence” SSD controller decisively and completely cleans in the best traditions of the demolition of illegal trade points.
But in order for such an intricate “migration” to be possible, the drive needs free space, but it is not always there. In conditions of tightness, the drive begins to settle its "tenants" not into neighboring blocks, but where it will turn out. 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 place on a solid-state drive not occupied, in order to prolong its service life and not lose in speed. And, although in modern models a decent amount of space is “bitten off” in the service area already at the manufacturing stage, many users still leave part of the storage capacity of the drive unmarked for reinsurance.
After all available channels were involved in the archaic parallel ATA (IDE) interface and all the speed was squeezed out, the drives (most of the hard drives) moved to serial SATA, which with its AHCI protocol remarkably docked with sluggish HDD, but with solid-state drives began to provoke delays in the execution of commands.
And even before the question arose that the tribute to history is, of course, good, but the SSD is long overdue to “emulate” hard drives with dimensions, and it would be good to reduce SSDs to dimensions acceptable for mobile technology.
No sooner said than done! In 2009, a compromise version was born - miniature drives of the mSATA form factor, which, with modest dimensions, did not require the development of new protocols for interaction with SSDs and simply “effectively lost weight” in comparison with their predecessors. Yes, the speed of operation of such drives was limited by the capabilities of the SATA-III, which has overwhelmed enthusiasts, and the speed of serial data transmission has already started to rest against the real maximum (not 6 Gbit / s, but slightly more mundane numbers) of the interface and threatened to become a bottleneck SSD.
mSATA was not a technical breakthrough, but the principle of “the same soup, but a
Was it possible to get around the limitations of SATA in the olden days? In desktop computers - as it was! Drives based on the PCI-Express x2, x4 or x8 interface were fully ignited in high-speed systems at peak speeds above 1 GB / s.
However, the "bottleneck" in the form of SATA-III annoyed not everyone, but the theory with numbers in the sequential write / read measurements and the real increase in the responsiveness of the drives are two big differences. This is how to measure the slope of the car on the markings on the speedometer. Not only what boy didn’t judge cars at the maximum possible speed, but over time everyone understands that there are much more important things in vehicles. In short, for 4 years of bright life, mSATA has settled in most of the skinny and generally premium laptops, and sometimes tablets.
Prior to the implementation of the NVMe protocol, the fastest SSDs were a RAID array in a PCI-Express adapter
Just move on was still necessary, so since 2013, the newest history of SSD has been decided. The most modern and progressive format was born - M.2. It is, in its essence, the “worthy son” of the familiar PCI-Express: some “transitional” drives for desktops consisted of an SSD module in 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 dispense with such half-measures and have a “native” connector for SSD in the form factor M.2. For all other cases, you need to remember 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 delays will be drives using the NVMe protocol, which replaced the ones developed for hard drives AHCI.
SSD format M.2 - fashionable, stylish, productive
Where materiel and chilling details?
Now that we have understood the stages of the formation of an SSD, it is not a sin to delve into the principles of operation of such drives and evaluate how the filling of innovative computer components has developed. Stay with us, and soon we will give you the "fried" iron facts under an easily digestible "sauce"!
To be continued, comrades!
Thank you for your attention and stay with Kingston on Hiktatimes!
For more information about Kingston and HyperX products, visit the company's official website . In choosing your kit HyperX help page with visual aids .
Our previous posts:
- HyperX Impact memory lines - mobile - does not mean slow
- HyperX DDR3 memory rulers - what is what in the model range?
- HyperX DDR4 memory rulers - what to choose for your computer?
- USB drive HyperX Savage USB 3.1 Gen 1 with a capacity of 128 gigabytes
- Interesting facts from the history of solid-state drives
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/368355/
All Articles