Anatomy of SSDs

SSDs are perhaps the hottest new hardware development in storage. They offer the promise of very high performance and low power. From the lowly laptop SSD to the ultra high-performance of Fusion-IO and Texas Memory, SSDs have a great deal of buzz about them as witnessed by the number of reviews and tech-focused articles around the web and the print media. As with all technologies there are benefits to them and there are limitations. This goal of this article is to help understand the technology including the benefits and limitations by beginning with the building blocks the NAND Flash chips. To truly understand them you have to start with the underlying technology, floating-gate transistors…

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