Inside Solid State Drives (SSDs)

by Rino Micheloni, Alessia Marelli, Kam Eshghi

Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9400751451

Check price @ amazon.com , amazon.ca , amazon.co.uk

Book Description

Solid State Drives (SSDs) are gaining momentum in enterprise and client applications, replacing Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) by offering higher performance and lower power. In the enterprise, developers of data center server and storage systems have seen CPU performance growing exponentially for the past two decades, while HDD performance has improved linearly for the same period. Additionally, multi-core CPU designs and virtualization have increased randomness of storage I/Os. These trends have shifted performance bottlenecks to enterprise storage systems. Business critical applications such as online transaction processing, financial data processing and database mining are increasingly limited by storage performance.

In client applications, small mobile platforms are leaving little room for batteries while demanding long life out of them. Therefore, reducing both idle and active power consumption has become critical. Additionally, client storage systems are in need of significant performance improvement as well as supporting small robust form factors. Ultimately, client systems are optimizing for best performance/power ratio as well as performance/cost ratio.

SSDs promise to address both enterprise and client storage requirements by drastically improving performance while at the same time reducing power.

Inside Solid State Drives walks the reader through all the main topics related to SSDs: from NAND Flash to memory controller (hardware and software), from I/O interfaces (PCIe/SAS/SATA) to reliability, from error correction codes (BCH and LDPC) to encryption, from Flash signal processing to hybrid storage. We hope you enjoy this tour inside Solid State Drives.

Book Reviews

“This collection of chapters written by many different authors aims to enlighten the reader on all aspects of SSDs. … if you are interested in how SSDs really work, this may be the book you are looking for.” (Bernard Kuc, Computing Reviews, July, 2013)

“Detailed book on SSD architecture suitable for new SSD hardware designers, firmware engineers who want to get up to speed quickly. The book offers a systematic overview starting with how HDD differ from SSDs, how NAND arrays operate, how SATA, SAS, PCIe SSDs differ, how supercaps differ from tantalum caps. … Unique features: Overview of hybrid SSDs, math behind BCH codes.” (R. Prakash, Amazon.com, July, 2013)

Customer Reviews

Good to beginners on Flash NAND Memories & SSD products

Detailed diagrams & explanations of concepts

Well organized contents & chapters

Detailed book on SSD architecture suitable for new SSD hardware designers, firmware engineers who want to get up to speed quickly. The book offers a systematic overview starting with how HDD differ from SSDs, how NAND arrays operate, how SATA, SAS, PCIe SSDs differ, how supercaps differ from tantalum caps. Concise explanations of garbage collection, wear leveling including algorithms for implementing it, bad block management, ECC. Intuitive diagrams on how PCIe SSDs differ from SATA/SAS SSDs, overview of new standards like NVMe and SOP. Good overview of ONFI Toggle NAND vs traditional NAND. Unique features: Overview of hybrid SSDs, math behind BCH codes . Negatives: Overly focused on vendors like IDT, STEC. Each chapter has a different author some chapters like chapter 5 and 6 on NAND flash, parasitic capacitors dives deep into a level more suitable for SSD designers and covers new topics like 3D arrays. Omissions: Recent 1.8" form factor SAS SSDs, mention of A19nm NAND, real life performance numbers of commercially available SSDs.