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SSD controllers, however, are in a class by themselves. They often have a DDR3 memory pool to help with managing the NAND itself. Many drives also incorporate single-level cell caches that act as buffers, increasing drive performance by dedicating fast NAND to read/write cycles. Because the NAND flash in an SSD is typically connected to the controller through a series of parallel memory channels, you can think of the drive controller as performing some of the same load balancing work as a high-end storage array — SSDs don’t deploy RAID internally, but wear leveling, garbage collection, and SLC cache management all have parallels in the big iron world.

Some drives also use data compression algorithms to reduce total number of writes and improve the drive’s lifespan. The SSD controller handles error correction, and the algorithms that control for single-bit errors have become increasingly complex as time has passed.

Unfortunately, we can’t go into too much detail on SSD controllers because companies lock down their various secret sauces. Much of NAND flash’s performance is determined by the underlying controller, and companies aren’t willing to lift the lid too far on how they do what they do, lest they hand a competitor an advantage.

A typical SSD controller

The SSD controller

It should be obvious by now that SSDs require much more sophisticated control mechanisms than hard drives do. That’s not to diss magnetic media — I actually think HDDs deserve more respect than they are given. The mechanical challenges involved in balancing multiple read-write heads nanometers above platters that spin at 5,400 to 10,000 RPM are nothing to sneeze at. The fact that HDDs perform this challenge while pioneering new methods of recording to magnetic media and eventually wind up selling drives at 3-5 cents per gigabyte is simply incredible.

Note that in this example, the drive has taken advantage of the fact that it can write very quickly to empty pages by writing new values for the first four blocks (A’-D’). It’s also written two new blocks, E and H. Blocks A-D are now marked as stale, meaning they contain information that the drive has marked as out-of-date. During an idle period, the SSD will move the fresh pages over to a new block, erase the old block, and mark it as free space. This means that the next time the SSD needs to perform a write, it can write directly to the now-empty Block X, rather than performing the program/erase cycle.

The next concept we will to discuss is TRIM. When you delete a file from Windows on a typical hard drive, the file isn’t deleted immediately. Instead, the operating system tells the hard drive that it can overwrite the physical area of the disk where that data was stored the next time it needs to perform a write. This is why it’s possible to undelete files (and why deleting files in Windows doesn’t typically clear much physical disk space until you empty the recycling bin). With a traditional HDD, the OS doesn’t need to pay attention to where data is being written or what the relative state of the blocks or pages is. With an SSD, this matters.

The TRIM command allows the operating system to tell the SSD that it can skip rewriting certain data the next time it performs a block erase. This lowers the total amount of data that the drive writes and increases SSD longevity. Both reads and writes damage NAND flash, but writes do far more damage than reads. Fortunately, block-level longevity has not proven to be an issue in modern NAND flash.

The last two concepts we want to talk about are wear leveling and write amplification. Because SSDs write data to pages but erase data in blocks, the amount of data being written to the drive is always larger than the actual update. If you make a change to a 4KB file, for example, the entire block that 4K file sits within must be updated and rewritten. Depending on the number of pages per block and the size of the pages, you might end up writing 4MB worth of data to update a 4KB file. Garbage collection reduces the impact of write amplification, as does the TRIM command. Keeping a significant chunk of the drive free and/or manufacturer overprovisioning can also reduce the impact of write amplification.

Wear leveling refers to the practice of ensuring that certain NAND blocks aren’t written and erased more often than others. While wear leveling increases a drive’s life expectancy and endurance by writing to the NAND equally, it can actually increase write amplification. In other to distribute writes evenly across the disk, it’s sometimes necessary to program and erase blocks even though their contents haven’t actually changed. A good wear leveling algorithm seeks to balance these impacts.

The following image steps through the garbage collection process.

Reads, writes, and erasure

One of the functional limitations of SSDs is that while they can read and write data very quickly to an empty drive, overwriting data is much slower. This is because while SSDs read data at the page level (meaning from individual rows within the NAND memory grid) and can write at the page level, assuming that surrounding cells are empty, they can only erase data at the block level. This is because the act of erasing NAND flash requires a high amount of voltage. While you can theoretically erase NAND at the page level, the amount of voltage required stresses the individual cells around the cells that are being re-written. Erasing data at the block level helps mitigate this problem.

The only way for an SSD to update an existing page is to copy the contents of the entire block into memory, erase the block, and then write the contents of the old block + the updated page. If the drive is full and there are no empty pages available, the SSD must first scan for blocks that are marked for deletion but that haven’t been deleted yet, erase them, and then write the data to the now-erased page. This is why SSDs can become slower as they age — a mostly-empty drive is full of blocks that can be written immediately, a mostly-full drive is more likely to be forced through the entire program/erase sequence.

If you’ve used SSDs, you’ve likely heard of something called “garbage collection.” Garbage collection is a background process that allows a drive to mitigate the performance impact of the program/erase cycle by performing certain tasks in the background.

The reason TLC NAND is slower than MLC or SLC has to do with how data moves in and out of the NAND cell. With SLC NAND, the controller only needs to know if the bit is a 0 or a 1. With MLC NAND, the cell may have four values — 00, 01, 10, or 11. With TLC NAND, the cell can have eight values. Reading the proper value out of the cell requires that the memory controller use a very precise voltage to ascertain whether any particular cell is charged or not.

NAND is nowhere near as fast as main memory, but it’s multiple orders of magnitude faster than a hard drive. While write latencies are significantly slower for NAND flash than read latencies, they still outstrip traditional spinning media.

There are two things to notice in the above chart. First, note how adding more bits per cell of NAND has a significant impact on the memory’s performance. It’s worse for writes as opposed to reads — typical triple-level-cell (TLC) latency is 4x worse compared to single-level cell (SLC) NAND for reads, but 6x worse for writes. Erase latencies are also significantly impacted. The impact isn’t proportional, either — TLC NAND is nearly twice as slow as MLC NAND, despite holding just 50% more data (three bits per cell, instead of two).

Chart showing SSD latency

The diagram above shows a simple flash cell design. Electrons are stored in the floating gate, which then reads as charged “0” or not-charged “1.” Yes, in NAND flash, a 0 means that data is stored in a cell — it’s the opposite of how we typically think of a zero or one. NAND flash is organized in a grid. The entire grid layout is referred to as a block, while the individual rows that make up the grid are called a page. Common page sizes are 2K, 4K, 8K, or 16K, with 128 to 256 pages per block. Block size therefore typically varies between 256KB and 4MB.

One advantage of this system should be immediately obvious. Because SSDs have no moving parts, they can operate at speeds far above those of a typical HDD. The following chart shows the access latency for typical storage mediums given in microseconds.

How SSDs are different

Solid-state drives are called that specifically because they don’t rely on moving parts or spinning disks. Instead, data is saved to a pool of NAND flash. NAND itself is made up of what are called floating gate transistors. Unlike the transistor designs used in DRAM, which must be refreshed multiple times per second, NAND flash is designed to retain its charge state even when not powered up. This makes NAND a type of non-volatile memory.

The 60TB SAS SSD is only available right now for demonstration, though it will officially make its debut some time in 2017. Unfortunately, we don't yet know exactly what the drive itself will look like, though given the fact that it's just a SSD, I can't imagine it'll look especially wild.
Also read: How SSDs work https://www.nairaland.com/3300821/how-ssds-work

To understand how and why SSDs are different from spinning discs, we need to talk a little bit about hard drives. A hard drive stores data on a series of spinning magnetic disks, called platters. There’s an actuator arm with read/write heads attached to it. This arm positions the read-write heads over the correct area of the drive to read or write information.

Because the drive heads must align over an area of the disk in order to read or write data (and the disk is constantly spinning), there’s a non-zero wait time before data can be accessed. The drive may need to read from multiple locations in order to launch a program or load a file, which means it may have to wait for the platters to spin into the proper position multiple times before it can complete the command. If a drive is asleep or in a low-power state, it can take several seconds more for the disk to spin up to full power and begin operating.

From the very beginning, it was clear that hard drives couldn’t possibly match the speeds at which CPUs could operate. Latency in HDDs is measured in milliseconds, compared with nanoseconds for your typical CPU. One millisecond is 1,000,000 nanoseconds, and it typically takes a hard drive 10-15 milliseconds to find data on the drive and begin reading it. The hard drive industry introduced smaller platters, on-disk memory caches, and faster spindle speeds to counteract this trend, but there’s only so fast that drives can spin. Western Digital’s 10,000 RPM VelociRaptor family is the fastest set of drives ever built for the consumer market, while some enterprise drives spun up to 15,000 RPM. The problem is, even the fastest spinning drive with the largest caches and smallest platters are still achingly slow as far as your CPU is concerned.

Samsung’s 16TB SSD. (15.36TB, to be exact)

If you’ve been wanting as much storage as possible in an SSD form factor that doesn’t break the bank, well, you’ll have to keep waiting. But for those few with enough money to buy a private island — or at least a private data center — Seagate Technology has taken the wraps off of an unbelievable 60TB solid state drive (pictured above) at the Flash Memory Summit in Silicon Valley. The drive features a power efficiency of just 4TB/watt (15 watts total), comes in a 3.5-inch form factor packed with ultra-dense 3D NAND flash from Micron, and delivers more density than two 16TB 2.5-inch SSDs as a result.

The 60TB SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) SSD is intended for large-scale enterprise data centers that need maximum storage and compute performance. With just 17 of these drives, you can hit 1PB of storage; Seagate says it’s ideal for large local or cloud-based storage arrays, active archives, online video, and read-intensive environments. According to Anandtech, the drive sports dual port 12Gb/s SAS, with sequential read and write speeds of 1.5Gbps and 1Gbps, respectively. Seagate claims the drive simplifies the process of accommodating “hot” and “cold” data, eliminating the need to separate data out for “near-term availability or long-term storage.” Seagate also says the drive can hold 400 million photos or 12,000 DVDs, and that the design can scale to a 100TB version as well.

If you’ve been wanting as much storage as possible in an SSD form factor that doesn’t break the bank, well, you’ll have to keep waiting. But for those few with enough money to buy a private island — or at least a private data center — Seagate Technology has taken the wraps off of an unbelievable 60TB solid state drive (pictured above) at the Flash Memory Summit in Silicon Valley. The drive features a power efficiency of just 4TB/watt (15 watts total), comes in a 3.5-inch form factor packed with ultra-dense 3D NAND flash from Micron, and delivers more density than two 16TB 2.5-inch SSDs as a result.

The 60TB SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) SSD is intended for large-scale enterprise data centers that need maximum storage and compute performance. With just 17 of these drives, you can hit 1PB of storage; Seagate says it’s ideal for large local or cloud-based storage arrays, active archives, online video, and read-intensive environments. According to Anandtech, the drive sports dual port 12Gb/s SAS, with sequential read and write speeds of 1.5Gbps and 1Gbps, respectively. Seagate claims the drive simplifies the process of accommodating “hot” and “cold” data, eliminating the need to separate data out for “near-term availability or long-term storage.” Seagate also says the drive can hold 400 million photos or 12,000 DVDs, and that the design can scale to a 100TB version as well.

Silkmoth33:
I personally won't encourage anyone to get a PC.


Or just get a ps4 first first.

Because frankly speaking, PC gaming ain't gaming

AKBliv010 are you hearing dis guy [/sub]

AKBliv010:
A gaming laptop can cost 4 to 5 times the cost of a PS4. So it's up to how much you wish to spend.
I personally will go for a proper gaming laptop, why?
Game fun- free cracked games are available
Long-run economy - you may not have to pay for games and if you do, you can get them about 50% less than PS4 games
Durability- will depend on your budget, reputable brands will last long if well taken care of.
Mobility - game any where and can be connected to a monitor too.

Some reputable brands - https://www.overclockers.co.uk/laptops-and-tablets/gaming-laptops

You've said it all but one more important point which is electricity, if u use a ps4 u would needpower but on a decent gaming laptop it's a bit better cuz gaming runs down battery but if you know a place u can just plug and play games that one is solved

Who has seen the specs for Fifa 17... Ea just wan kill person

From what am seeing it looks like the game is going to be like nba live that ea released earlier this year it's also online but doesn't eat data a lot although you'll need a good network

The Crew features an open and persistent world for racing and free-roaming across a scaled-down recreation of the contiguous United States. The map is split into five regions: The Midwest, East Coast, The South, Mountain States, and West Coast. Each region has its own unique geographical features. Six main cities (one in each region, two in the Midwest) are featured in the game: Detroit and Chicago in the Midwest, New York City on the East Coast, Miami in The South, Las Vegas in the Mountain States, and Los Angeles on the West Coast. Various other cities, such as San Francisco, Seattle, Salt Lake City, Santa Fe, Dallas, New Orleans, St. Louis, and Washington D.C., are also featured in the game (other major cities such as Boston, Atlanta, Portland and Philadelphia are not included, however). Over thirty smaller cities and towns line the countryside like Nashville, Norfolk and others. It takes approximately 45 minutes in real time to drive from coast to coast in-game.

The single-player campaign is 20 hours long, and entails infiltrating criminal groups with protagonist Alex Taylor (Troy Baker). Players can also participate in mini-games called skills challenges that are peppered across the world. They are triggered when a player drives through them and it involves completing challenges such as weaving through gates and staying as close to a racing line as possible for a period of time. Players' scores are automatically saved so friends can try and beat their scores, in similar fashion to how Autolog works in games of the Need for Speed franchise. Missions can be played alone, with friends, or with online co-op matchmaking. The multiplayer mode lets a maximum of eight players to compete in races and other gametypes. There are no in-game loading screens or pauses. Players can also build cars with a tie-in app for iOS and Android.

The Crew creative director Julian Gerighty has called the game a role-playing game with large-scale multiplayer elements. The multiplayer is not separate from the single-player. Players can form "crews" to race together or against ghost records.

Though the player can play alone, the game requires a constant internet connection to play.

Is it for laptop or desktop

AKBliv010:
High speed RAM benefits people who do video editing, Computer Aided Deisgn (CAD) or converting large/complex files. There is very little gains in gaming. In this regard, it is overkill for gaming.

Ok so 2400mhz is ok

What about a 3200mhz 16gb rig is that a little overkill

MetaHuman:
Politics has always been between 2 douchebags -Seth marcfalene

Just go with the douchebag that appeals to you

Even in naija, dullard vs el clueless

Where did he say that

All of our computers, big and small, have hard drives of some type and most of us know that it's the piece of hardware that stores our software, music, videos, and even our operating systems.

Beyond that, though, there are probably at least a few things you didn't know about this ubiquitous piece of computing equipment:

1. The very first hard drive, the 350 Disk Storage Unit, didn't just show up on store shelves out of nowhere but was part of a complete computer system by IBM, released in September, 1956... yes, 1956!


2. IBM started shipping this amazing new device to other companies in 1958 but they probably didn't just stick it in the mail - the world's first hard drive was about the size of an industrial refrigerator.

3.Shipping that thing was probably last on any buyer's mind, however, considering the fact that in 1961 this hard drive rented for over $1,000 USD per month. If that seemed outrageous, you could always purchase it for a little over $34,000 USD.

4. An average hard drive available today, like this 8 TB Seagate model at Amazon that sells for a little over $200 USD, is over 300 million times cheaper than that first IBM drive was.

5.If a customer in 1960 wanted that much storage, it would have cost her $77.2 Billion USD, a little more than the entire GDP of the United Kingdom that year!

6. IBM's expensive, monstrosity of a hard drive had a total capacity of just under 4 MB, about the size of a single, average-quality music track like you'd get from iTunes or Amazon.

7. Today's hard drives can store a bit more than that. As of late 2015, Samsung holds the record for the largest hard drive, the 16 TB PM1633a SSD, but 8 TB drives are much more common.


8. So just 60 years after IBM's 3.75 MB hard drive was the best of the best, you can get over 2 million times as much storage in an 8 TB drive and, as we just saw, at a tiny fraction of the cost.

9. Bigger hard drives don't just let us store more stuff than we used to be able to, they enable entire new industries that simply couldn't have existed without these major advances in storage technology.

10. Inexpensive but large hard drives let companies like Backblaze provide a service where you back up your data to their servers instead of to your own backup discs. In late 2015, they were using 50,228 hard drives to do that.

11. Consider Netflix, which, according to a 2013 report, needed 3.14 PB (around 3.3 million GB) of hard drive space to store all of those movies!

12. Think Netflix's needs are big? Facebook was storing close to 300 PB of data on hard drives in mid-2014. No doubt that number is a lot bigger today.

13. Not only has storage capacity increased, size has decreased at the same time... drastically so. A single MB today takes up 11 billion times less physical space than a MB did in the late 50's.

14. Looking at that another way: that 256 GB smartphone in your pocket is equivalent to 54 Olympic-sized swimming pools completely full of 1958-era hard drives.

15. In many ways, that old IBM hard drive isn't that different than modern hard drives: both have platters that spin and a head attached to an arm that reads and writes data.

16. Those spinning platters are pretty fast, usually turning 5,400 or 7,200 times per minute, depending on the hard drive.

17. All those moving parts generate heat and eventually start to fail, often times loudly. The soft noise your computer makes is probably the fans circulating air but those other, irregular ones, are often times your hard drive.

18. Things that move eventually wear out - we know that. For that, and some other reasons, the solid state drive, which has no moving parts (it's basically a giant flash drive), is slowly replacing the traditional hard drive.

19. Unfortunately, neither traditional nor SSD hard drives can continue to shrink forever. Try to store a piece of data in too small a space and the very physics of how hard drives work breaks down. (Seriously - it's called superparamagnetism.)

20. All that means is that we'll need to store data in different ways in the future. A lot of sci-fi sounding technology is in development right now, like 3D storage, holographic storage, DNA storage, and more.

21. Speaking of science fiction, Data, the android character in Star Trek, says in one episode that his brain holds 88 PB. That's much less than Facebook, it seems, which I'm not sure exactly how to take.

From:http://pcsupport.about.com/od/things-you-didnt-know/fl/hard-disk-drives.htm?utm_source=zergnet&utm_medium=tcg&utm_campaign=zergnet-test-1096307

That New 8 TB Hard Drive Would Have Cost $77 Billion in 1960

That New 8 TB Hard Drive Would Have Cost $77 Billion in 1960

All but the third one look like crap
In The first two u used the default background for Mac os. .....why

hardeydhoying:
You're still saying the same thing. 29Mbps is same with 29Mb/s!! The p is denoted with / , which simply means the "per".

29Mbps (29Mb/s) = 29Megabits per second. while

29MBps (29MB/s) = 29Megabyte per second.


B for Bytes while b for bits.

Thank you honestly this thing causes problems sometimes is a person doesn't know the diff ..........
and that is how Nigerian isp will be advertising 13mbps (megabitspersecond) and ppl will think other wise hmmmmm

HyDef:
Actually, he's not wrong. Depending on the codec, whether the video is compressed or not, and especially the bit rate, a 1080p video could hit as high as 8GB.

In fact, a Blu-ray disc can hold up to 25gb, and they are used for full HD videos. A typical DVD does 4.7, so it shows that some full HD content surpasses 5GB.

Let's clear something here
Hd 1280*720
Fullhd 1920*1080
Qhd 2160*1440
4k 3840*2160
True 4k 4096*2160
He said an average hd film not full hd they are very different because one will have more data and pixels than the other although what you said is actually true because of those confusing codecs out there like.264 .264 etc i might be wrong

HyDef:
Actually, he's not wrong. Depending on the codec, whether the video is compressed or not, and especially the bit rate, a 1080p video could hit as high as 8GB.

In fact, a Blu-ray disc can hold up to 25gb, and they are used for full HD videos. A typical DVD does 4.7, so it shows that some full HD content surpasses 5GB.

Let's clear something here
Hd 1280*720
Fullhd 1920*1080
Qhd 2160*1440
4k 3840*2160
True 4k 4096*2160