The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 18, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
The Blind SSD
Modern OSes talk to hard drives using logical block addressing. While hard drives are rotational media, logical block addressing organizes sectors on a hard drive linearly. When you go to save a file, Windows simply issues a write command for your file at a specific logical block address, say LBA 15 for example.
Your OS knows what LBAs are available and which ones are occupied. When you delete a file, the LBAs that point to that file on your hard disk are listed as available. The data you’ve deleted hasn’t actually been removed and it doesn’t get wiped until those sectors on the drive are actually overwritten.
Believe it or not, SSDs actually work the same way.
The flash translation layer in a SSD controller maps LBAs to pages on the drive. The table below explains what happens to the data on the SSD depending on the action in the OS:
| Action in the OS | Reaction on a HDD | Reaction on an SSD |
| File Create | Write to a Sector | Write to a Page |
| File Overwrite | Write new data to the same Sector | Write to a Different Page if possible, else Erase Block and Write to the Same Page |
| File Delete | Nothing | Nothing |
When you delete a file in your OS, there is no reaction from either a hard drive or SSD. It isn’t until you overwrite the sector (on a hard drive) or page (on a SSD) that you actually lose the data. File recovery programs use this property to their advantage and that’s how they help you recover deleted files.
The key distinction between HDDs and SSDs however is what happens when you overwrite a file. While a HDD can simply write the new data to the same sector, a SSD will allocate a new (or previously used) page for the overwritten data. The page that contains the now invalid data will simply be marked as invalid and at some point it’ll get erased.
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zdzichu - Sunday, March 22, 2009 - link
Very nice and thorough article. I only lack more current status of TRIM command support in current operating systems. For example, Linux supports it since last year:http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_2_6_28#head-a1a9591...">http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_2_6_28#h...a9591f48...
Sinned - Sunday, March 22, 2009 - link
Outstanding article that really helped me understand SSD drives. I wonder how much of an impact the new SATA III standard will have on SSD drives? I believe we are still at the beginning stage for SSD drives and your article shows that much more work needs to be done. My respect for OCZ and how they responded in a positive and productive way should be a model for the rest of the SSD makers. Thank you again for such a concise article.Respectfully,
Sinned
529th - Sunday, March 22, 2009 - link
The first thing I thought of was Democracy. Don't know why. Maybe it was because a company listened to our common goal of performance. Thank you OCZ for listening, I'm sure it will pay off!!!araczynski - Saturday, March 21, 2009 - link
very nice read. the 4/512 issue seems a rather stupid design decision, or perhaps more likely a stupid problem to find this 4/512 solution as 'acceptable'.although a great marketing choice, built in automatic life expectancy reduction.
sounds like the manufacturers want the hard drives to become a disposable medium like styrofoam cups.
perhaps when they narrow the disparity down to 4/16, i might consider buying an ssd. that, or when they beat the 'old school' physical platters in price.
until then, get back to the drawing board and stop crapping out these half arsed 'should be good enough' solutions.
IntelUser2000 - Sunday, March 22, 2009 - link
araczynski: The 4/512 isn't done by accident. It's done to lower prices. The flash technology used in SSDs are meant to replace platter HDDs in the future. There's no way of doing that without cost reductions like these. Even with that the SSDs still cost several times more per storage space.araczynski - Tuesday, March 24, 2009 - link
i understand that, but i don't remember original hard drives being released and being slower than the floppy drives they were replacing.this is part of the 'release beta' products mentality and make the consumer pay for further development.
the 5.25" floppy was better than the huge floppy in all respects when it was released. the 3.5" floppy was better than the 5.25" floppy when it was released. the usb flash drives were better than the 3.5" floppies when they were released.
i just hate the way this is being played out at the consumer's expense.
hellcats - Saturday, March 21, 2009 - link
Anand,What a great article. I usually have to skip forwards when things bog down, but they never did with this long, but very informative article. Your focus on what matters to users is why I always check anandtech first thing every morning.
juraj - Saturday, March 21, 2009 - link
I'm curious what capacity is the OCZ Vertex drive reviewed. Is it an 120 / 250g drive or supposedly slower 30 / 60g one?Symbolics - Friday, March 20, 2009 - link
The method for generating "used" drives is flawed. For creating a true used drive, the spare blocks must be filled as well. Since this was not done, the results are biased towards the Intel drives with their generous amount of spare blocks that were *not* exhausted when producing the used state. An additional bias is introduced by the reduction of the IOmeter write test to 8 GB only. Perhaps there are enough spare blocks on the Intel drives so that these 8 GB can be written to "fresh" blocks without the need for (time-consuming) erase operations.Apart from these concerns, I enjoyed reading the article.
unknownError - Saturday, March 21, 2009 - link
I also just created an account to post, very nice article!Lots of good well thought out information, I'm so tired of synthetic benchmarks glad someone goes through the trouble to bench these things right (and appears to have the education to really understand them). Whats with the grammar police though? geez...