Solid-State Drives: 7 Things To Know

Find out how SSDs stack up to hard disk drives and how they can benefit your data center.

Jim O'Reilly

June 23, 2016

8 Slides

The storage industry is at a major crossroad. Hard drives have been eclipsed in many areas by solid-state drives and the effects of this now mature technology are rippling across the storage industry, changing everything from software to appliance configurations.

A few urban myths have grown up during the rapid evolution of SSD storage. Some of these cast doubt on durability or pricing, and even the performance benefits of drives that run hundreds of times faster than hard drives. These misconceptions have slowed SSD adoption, to the financial detriment of IT operations that have bought many more servers and hard drive arrays than needed.

At the end-user level, who wouldn’t like a much faster PC, for instance?  I installed an SSD and wouldn’t go back to HDDs! Every single user of IT systems sees improved system response and more productive as a result.

It’s time to step back, cut through all the hype and FUD and take a look at where solid-state drives and their associated storage are really at. We are going to take a peek at the key factors characterizing SSDs. We’ll address why they make sense, while covering the issues and myths that surround the technology.

(Image: YurivVlasenko)

About the Author(s)

Jim O'Reilly

President

Jim O'Reilly was Vice President of Engineering at Germane Systems, where he created ruggedized servers and storage for the US submarine fleet. He has also held senior management positions at SGI/Rackable and Verari; was CEO at startups Scalant and CDS; headed operations at PC Brand and Metalithic; and led major divisions of Memorex-Telex and NCR, where his team developed the first SCSI ASIC, now in the Smithsonian. Jim is currently a consultant focused on storage and cloud computing.

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