Types of Solid-State Drives
- PCIe-based flash: Peripheral Component Interconnect Express-based flash has high performance performance. While these devices often have higher throughput and more input/output operations per second, their main advantage is much shorter latency.
- NVMe SSDs: Utilize an interface protocol called, Nonvolatile Memory Express (NVMe), which was jointly developed by companies in the NVM express workgroup, such as Samsung, Intel, and Seagate. NVMe works with Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (a.k.a. PCI Express or PCIe) to deliver high data transfer speeds, reaching read speeds of over 3000 MB/s. The reduced latency makes this type of SSD ideal for gamers and their PlayStations. These SSDs usually come with a heatsink to prevent overheating.
- Flash DIMMs: Flash dual in-line memory modules reduce latency even more than PCIe flash cards because they minimize the possibility of PCIe bus conflict. They require custom drivers designed specifically for flash DIMMS, as well as modifications to the motherboard’s read-only I/O system.
- Hybrid DRAM-flash storage: Dynamic random access memory (DRAM) channel arrangement combines flash with server DRAM.
Introduction to Solid-State Drive (SSD)
SSD is a non-volatile storage device, which stands for Solid State Drive, and protocols such as SATA and SAS of traditional hard disk drives (HDD) may be used. New form factors such as the M.2 form factor, and new I/O protocols such as NVM Express have been developed to address specific requirements of the Flash memory technology used in SSDs.