Low End Desktop grade SSD drives for Servers

  There are numerous SSD flask drives available for desktops and laptops. The desktop drives being the 3.5 formfactor and the laptop drives being the 2.5 inch form factor size. SSD drive have increased in sales, use, and of course popularity. Replacing a spindle drive iin a lapto por desktop wit ha solid state flash drive boosts performace of any aging or not so old computer or laptop.  It's provides a boost of performance that surpases even memory upgardes.  The throughput of solid stated drives compared to spindle platter drives found in the average deskto pand laptop. If you need a boost of performance the sngle best thing that you can do is replace your old drive with an SSD drives.  

Support for solid state drives (SSD) is dependent on the manufacturer. The most common warranty for MLC drives is 1 year but many of the bigger vendors so offer a three year warranty with replacement. Support can come in various ways. It can be remote support utilizing remote support software like web based remote support software. But often than not support involved contacting the manufacturer or retailer who sold the drive looking for replacement because the usual sign that there's a problem with a solid state drive is when it has failed.

SLC vs MLC

Performance gains are realized immediately after the SSD drives are installed. They can be the system drive, C: drive, or added as a second storage drive. The choices for MLC drives are many. Desktop grade solid state drives (SSD drives) use MLC technology. MLC, Multiple Logical Cell, are fine for desktops and laptops. Enterprise SSD drives are for server and storage (any tier 1,2,3). Enterprise SLC (Single Logical Cell) technology is for servers and storage appliances.        

The main key differenciating factore to consider and remember regarding the solid state drives for desktop is they are MLC, and they have a shorter time to failure. That is why they are for desktops.  All flash drives suffer from degradation from many writes to the drive. That is why using them in a file server for example is seriously not recommended. In a file server scenario, the cells are written much more often then they would in a desktop (notmal average desktop usage) because file servers are just as the name insinuates, a place to save and open files from.  Platter drives never had the problem of a finite time they can be written to because they use magetic technology. Single platter drives suffer from other things but how many times they can be written to is not one of them as it is for solid state.

There is a trade-off to be considered depending on which of the two different types of flash SSD you select. Keep in mind, MLC SSD drives are flash drives lile your USB flash drive. Multi-level cell (MLC) flash is the most common type of flash drive and technology. MLC flash technology it most often used in consumer-grade products that we are familiar with. Consumer-grade products that use flash technology are phones, cameras, USB memory sticks and MP3 players. MLC flash technology does however and surprisingly also exist in some enterprise storage products. Not surpring however that they are showing up in storage products because of the dramatic cost difference between the two flash technologies. MLC is less much less expensive then SLC. The trade-off is thet MLC suffers from increased wear rates than SLC. In addition, MLC also has a lower write performance compared to single-level cell (SLC) flash technology. write performance can be key to deploying servers successfully. SLC is indeed faster and much more reliable. It is featured as tier 1 storage in best-performing storage arrays. Configuring servers or storage appliances with SLC technollogy can be very expensive and that is where the lure of using these inexpensive MLC desktop drives can occur. MLC is costs considerable less thatn SLC and it's temping to configure a server with MLC.

Why MLC SSD Drives Wear-down and Fail Faster

SLC technology uses a single cell to store/save one bit (a 1 or a 0) of data. MLC memory technology is more complex in design. MLC drive technology can interpret four digital states from a signal stored in a single cell. This makes MLC flash denser, and one would think it would cost more because of the density but it is the reverse - MLC is less expensive for a given area and so cheaper to produce. However, and this is the big problem, it wears out faster because the same cell is written to more. A MLC cell is typically rated at 10,000 write/erase cycles, while an SLC cell might last 10 times that number of erase/write cycles before failing. MLC in servers is just not recommended at all as servers, in particular file servers, tend to write/erase/write much more than do desktops because servers are multi-user.

eMLC SSD Drives

There is the latest, at the time of this article, MLC technology called eMLC. eMLC has some advanced capabilities to lesson the number of erase/writes. These new capabilities and features to reduce the number of cycles is mostly a function of the storage controller. These features attempt and do so successfully the number of writes to the the MLC drive and by doing so extend the life of the cells and drive. These added advanced features include 1. wear-levelling. Ware-leveling moves write cycles to different parts or sections of the drive chip so that cells wear evenly; 2. on-device de-duplication, remove duplicates which reduces the total 1's and 0's count written and so lowers, by slowing down, the wear to the cells; 3. redundancy, like a hot-spare used in spindle but all done inside each drive which reserves a portion of the device's capacity to replace cells as they fail over time (and yes, they do fail); and 4) write optimization, which caches or stores data writes so they can be made in larger group operations to reduce the number of drive write operations.