The SSD then whips those together, eight eggs at a time, with extra flavors and ingredients in the way of DRAM caches and a high speed controller to make a tasty omelette. Going back to the earlier analogy, the flash memory is the eggs. Flash memory can be fast, but DRAM is even faster. A 1TB SSD for example might have a 256MB DRAM cache that holds the mapping tables. The fastest SSDs also have DRAM caches to help store commonly accessed data. ![]() a flash memory card developed by Sony for use in digital cameras, camcorders and other devices. Eight channels, each doing 500MB/s of data transfers, gives 4GB/s of potential performance. He suggests keeping vital data on Memory Sticks or on removable hard drives. SSDs typically have anywhere from four to as many as 16 channels that can be used for accessing flash storage. They do this by reading or writing to multiple flash chips at the same time. SSDs have high-speed controllers designed to read and write data at speeds of up to 5GB/s (and 7GB/s models are coming). One of the major differences between a modern SSD using NAND flash and a micro-SSD card that also uses NAND flash is in the way the flash is accessed. Intel's Optane SSDs utilize a different technology called 3D Xpoint. Some manufactures, like Intel, have created an alternative to flash, too. Flash-based SSDs didn't hit the market until the 90s, and they were prohibitively expensive-$1,000 or more compared to $100 today. Some SSDs were also RAM-based from the '70s to the '00s to increase read/write speeds, but this meant you could never turn your computer off, unless you wanted to lose all your data. In fact, the earliest SSDs did not use flash storage, but something called EAROM (electrically erasable read only memory), an early type of non-volatile memory that had read/write capabilities, but processed data very slowly. Any type of storage that doesn't move is an SSD, but while flash memory can technically be considered a type of solid state drive, it's more accurate to differentiate it from an actual SSD like the Samsung 970 EVO (opens in new tab) because flash memory is just an ingredient, not the recipe. ![]() ![]() Calling something an SSD is just a way of differentiating a storage solution that is designed with moving parts, like an HDD, from one that has no moving parts. However, while most SSDs do use flash memory, not all SSDs do. HDDs as primary storage are pretty much dead, but still make a great, secondary storage solution. SSD storage is the omelet part of the recipe, and it's probably your primary storage device in your PC or laptop. Plus, there's less of it, with a far more simplistic controller. However, the flash memory in flash drives is often much slower than the flash used in SSDs.
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