Speed Thrills – The Next Generation of SSD

“It wasn’t until I went to college and I got my first motorcycle that I understood the thrill of speed.”   -Vin Diesel

Google wants to give your business a gigabit fiber connection to the Internet backbone, and Comcast is rolling out a claimed 2Gbps fiber network in Atlanta. In addition to these fiber offerings, the ever evolving DOCSIS specifications—already supporting 300Mbps (megabits per second)—will soon see speeds rivaling, or even topping, current fiber offerings.

Besides pure network speed, the last few years have seen an explosion in connected devices with more devices now actively connected to the Internet than there are people on Earth.

“We believe the number of internet connected devices reached 8.7 billion in 2012. There are a number of estimates out there by others, but they are generally in the eight to ten billion range.” -Rod Soderbery, Cisco 

With the massive Internet bandwidth increases and the exponential growth in connected devices, traditional data storage systems can no longer keep up.

The Era of SSD (Solid State Drives) 

In 2008, when the SSD first burst on the scene, it was a technology with promise, but with flaws. Booting a computer in seconds, rather than minutes, and swapping massive files effortlessly, attracted numerous early adopters, with workstation users and hard-core gamers at the front of that line. However, reliability and compatibility issues plagued these early drives, keeping them out of critical business systems and typical client computers.

Once Intel joined the party, the tide began to shift, and reliability, compatibility, and consistent performance became the new norm. In the years following, the number of SSD users swelled as the public increasingly learned the benefits of that raw speed.

In 2013, and 2014, we saw Enterprises begin to adopt SSDs in their datacenters. The SSD is exponentially faster than the traditional magnetic hard drive, but it also operates at a lower temperature, and draws less power. In fact, in several cases, they have reached reliability parity with those magnetic drives.

PCI Express 

Fast forward to 2015, SSDs have saturated the market from the datacenter all the way down to the most basic laptop, but we ran into a new problem, the interface. SSDs have improved so quickly that the interfacing architecture could no longer keep up, the SATA specification did not evolve quickly enough, so Intel (along with a few other manufacturers) turned to PCI Express—the high-speed interface that connects the most powerful peripheral components—for example; graphics processors, and those fiber optic interface cards.

Intel’s latest offering, the PCI Express based SSD 750 is the ‘next generation’ of solid state drive, delivering read speeds in excess of 2,200MB/s while being able to write 70GB per day for five whole years, while keeping cool and sipping from the power grid.

The speed of data is increasing in every way imaginable and there is no end in sight. From datacenters, to workstations, and even tablets, the SSD is a key link in the support chain for all this speed. Global IP Networks understands these technologies and maintains servers for businesses in the Dallas area that value speed and reliability. If this sounds like you, contact us for more information today.