Can someone explain exactly how SSD's work?

Imagine a really dense lite-brite set.

LiteBright-1.jpg


But it only has one color.

If a dot is "on", it's a 1. If it's dark, it's a 0. By scanning across and down any lane the lite-brite can tell if an individual dot is on or off. And when you unplug the lite-bright the on dots don't turn off, they stay on. So when you plug it back in, the monster is still there.

Howdat? :bigthumb:
 
Dark Volcanic said:
More specifically, it's a nonvolatile form that works like the memory in their computer, meaning that it doesn't require power constantly. The downside is that it has significantly reduced re-write capability compared to standard memory. The individual bits are written to once, and then passed over by the controller chip until the entire drive has been written to, and then it starts again from the first bit, this helps preserve data integrity by keeping the wear and tear on each bit to a minimum. I think most drives have a mean limit of 100,000 writes per bit before they fail.

Mechanically, it's a tube of silicon that moves in one direction or another based on charge applied to it.
Negative charge moves it down, positive moves it up. When it's up, its a 1, when it's down, it's a 0.
Click to expand...

The intel ones have a MTBF of 1.2 million hours(136 years yeah right) and based on S.M.A.R.T. data from the user community they should last 10-15 years. A lot of users in the 6 month range are still seeing the wear out indicator in the 95-97 range meaning about a 10 year life span. Which beats out most of the HDDs I have ever owned and I have built up to 8TB of storage.
 
SterIO said:
There is no moving tube of silicon, but perhaps electrons that move within it. Change spinning disc to solid blob and change magnetic bumps to electrons.
Click to expand...
Bloops, you are correct. I was thinking of one of the prototype storage devices.


I was going to go into the tunnel effect and such, but you know what... just read up on it yourself.
It's way too much for me to want to try and summarize in simple terms that anybody will understand, because it's a far more complex process than the mechanical drives.
 
TheVoiceOfReason said:
Hence measuring their storage capacity in GigaBrailles.




I got nuthin'.
Click to expand...
A very small blind person is imprisoned in every HDD, doomed to forever read the small data bumps on the surface of your disc until they die.

When you no longer have use for your HDD, have mercy and open it up to let your blind man free.
 
imagine that your data is a bunch of gates in a huge field. they can be either open or closed. one or zero. When you supply electricity, you can make the gates open or close. When you remove the power, the gates stay the way you left them so that when you apply power again (turn the device back on) you can still see (read) which gates are open/closed (data).
 
You know what

Just tell them it's magic.

mother fucking magic

because that's probably what they'll take away from a real explanation anyway
 
Just rows and rows of light switches. When one is up it means one thing, when one is down it means the opposite. This is a bit. Power is only needed to change the state of the switch and to read the state of the switch. 8 switches together can form 256 combinations which can store 1 letter or number. This is a byte. 1048576 of these forms 1 megabyte (1000000 on the new mac os).

It takes 41,943,040 of these switches for each picture he saves off of his camera (give or take).
 
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