Solid-state storage (SSS) is a type of non-volatile computer storage that stores and retrieves digital information using only electronic circuits, without any involvement of moving mechanical parts. This differs fundamentally from the traditional electromechanical storage, which records data using rotating or linearly moving media coated with magnetic material. Solid-state storage devices typically store data using electrically-programmable non-volatile flash memory, however some devices use battery-backed volatile random-access memory (RAM). Having no moving mechanical parts, solid-state storage is much faster than traditional electromechanical storage; as a downside, solid-state storage is significantly more expensive and suffers from the write amplification phenomenon. Solid-state storage devices come in various types, form factors, sizes of storage space, and interfacing options to satisfy application requirements for many different types of computer systems and appliances. Historically, secondary storage in computer systems has been implemented primarily by using magnetic properties of the surface coatings applied to rotating platters (in hard disk drives and floppy disks) or linearly moving narrow strips of plastic film (in tape drives). Pairing such magnetic media with read/write heads allows data to be written by separately magnetizing small sections of the ferromagnetic coating, and read later by detecting the transitions in magnetization. For the data to be read or written, exact sections of the magnetic media need to pass under the read/write heads that flow closely to the media surface; as a result, reading or writing data imposes delays required for the positioning of magnetic media and heads, with the delays differing depending on the actual technology. Over time, the performance gap between the central processing units (CPUs) and electromechanical storage (hard disk drives and their RAID setups) widened, requiring advancements in the secondary storage technology.

About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
Related concepts (8)
Serial Peripheral Interface
Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) is a de facto standard (with many variants) for synchronous serial communication, used primarily in embedded systems for short-distance wired communication between integrated circuits. SPI uses a main–subnode architecture, where one main device orchestrates communication by providing the clock signal and chip select signal(s) which control any number of subservient peripherals. Motorola's original specification uses four wires to perform full duplex communication.
Wear leveling
Wear leveling (also written as wear levelling) is a technique for prolonging the service life of some kinds of erasable computer storage media, such as flash memory, which is used in solid-state drives (SSDs) and USB flash drives, and phase-change memory. There are several wear leveling mechanisms that provide varying levels of longevity enhancement in such memory systems. The term preemptive wear leveling (PWL) has been used by Western Digital to describe their preservation technique used on hard disk drives (HDDs) designed for storing audio and video data.
NVM Express
NVM Express (NVMe) or Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface Specification (NVMHCIS) is an open, logical-device interface specification for accessing a computer's non-volatile storage media usually attached via the PCI Express bus. The initialism NVM stands for non-volatile memory, which is often NAND flash memory that comes in several physical form factors, including solid-state drives (SSDs), PCIe add-in cards, and M.2 cards, the successor to mSATA cards.
Show more

Graph Chatbot

Chat with Graph Search

Ask any question about EPFL courses, lectures, exercises, research, news, etc. or try the example questions below.

DISCLAIMER: The Graph Chatbot is not programmed to provide explicit or categorical answers to your questions. Rather, it transforms your questions into API requests that are distributed across the various IT services officially administered by EPFL. Its purpose is solely to collect and recommend relevant references to content that you can explore to help you answer your questions.