SSDs need to be optimized
By Alexis • Nov 14th, 2008 • Category: Industry NewsUnsurprisingly, the Solid State Hard Drives or SSDs are one of the hottest computer peripherals now a days. This is because of the significant benefits that these flash based drives offer over the traditional hard drives containing mechanical inner-parts.
The absence of any mechanical assembly and rotating disc with a reading head on it make the SSDs more tolerant against sudden bumps, dust and falls. Apart from this the Solid State Hard Drives are based on flash storage which offers a significant improvement in read/write speed. Due to such advantages the SSDs are likely to replace the traditional hard drives despite of the fact that they are very much expensive per byte.
No mechanical parts, no hassle. That’s the winning feature of the SSDs, but still there is a catch which can demoralize the computer enthusiasts who are seeking a big leap technically with the coming of such drives. Similar to the traditional hard drives the Solid State Drives too are a victim of Data Fragmentation in which the free disk space gets fragmented over a period of time. This fragmentation process is common in all the NTFS based Windows and it causes delay in disk’s read/write speed.
Apart from this the fragmented data generates even more serious issues in case of SSDs. The SSDs have a limited number of erase-write cycles and due to data fragmentation the erase-write cycles increases at a fast pace. This ultimately wears out the SSD too early. Thus the SSDs have to be optimized to cope up with data fragmentation otherwise this can lead to performance degradation of such drives by 80 percent.
Tags for this article: drives, windows, ssd netbook
