Akhtar Pasha looks at the new approach to enterprise storage technology—NAND-based flash SSDs in the wake of DRAM-based SSDs that are still going strong
The debate for supremacy in disk technologies continues to center around DRAM-based Solid State Disks or SSDs and NAND-based flash SSDs. While the former have been used in blade servers and enterprise storage arrays for quite some time, flash SSDs are non-volatile (they retain data without a power source), have no mechanical parts and are used in consumer electronic gadgets such as phones, PDAs and MP3 devices.
While HDDs have been the workhorses of enterprise storage for nearly 50 years, DRAM SSDs and now flash SSDs are getting more attention than ever. There are important speed differences between these two technologies—flash SSDs are much faster than spinning disks, but they are not as fast as DRAM-based SSD when handling I/O. So lets understand how both these two technologies work and where they differ from one another as well as how these two will be used in future.
