The SSD, a fast and durable storage medium.
The SSD has the distinctive feature of using flash memory chips, like USB drives, instead of a rotating magnetic-surface platter like hard drives. Flash-based storage media are becoming increasingly common and increasingly accessible.
With a durable lifespan (around five years for frequent but not overly intensive use), it is a highly responsive piece of electronic hardware, far less power-hungry than a traditional hard drive, with ultra-fast startup and loading of the operating system and programs. On a hard drive, read speed is around 50 to 100 MB per second, whereas on an SSD it ranges from 300 MB/s for entry-level drives up to 3000 MB/s for the highest-performing models. The SSD also offers better reliability (particularly against physical shocks) compared to a traditional hard drive. It is also very practical thanks to its small size (2.5-inch form factor).
The main difference between a traditional hard drive and the SSD is that the latter contains no moving parts for data storage. As a result, read speed is faster, and it has the advantage of producing little to no noise compared to its predecessor.
Some SSDs resist data recovery
But don’t be fooled! Data recovery on an SSD can prove far more laborious and uncertain than on a mechanical hard drive — particularly if an electronic failure or even a tiny power surge occurs while the drive is running. No cleanroom is needed to disassemble and process an SSD, so you might think that makes data recovery cheaper? Well, no! It’s actually the opposite, because it requires an enormous amount of engineering time: each memory chip on an SSD has to be desoldered one by one using infrared (there are often 8 per side, so count 16 Flash memory chips for a 128 GB drive, for example), and that’s when the real puzzle begins. The challenge is to work out the interleaving order of the 8 or 16 chips in RAID5, as if it were an 8- or 16-drive RAID server. A Herculean task.
Data recovery becomes more complex due to the very architecture of how the SSD is assembled:
- Making data recovery easy in the event of a hardware failure is often the least of a manufacturer’s concerns, and this is even truer for certain SSDs such as the model Kingston SSDNow Ms which uses a Sandforce controller. The same SandForce controller is used by Seagate for some of its SSD or even mechanical SATA drives, by Transcend for its USB drives… And in 50% of the latest-generation Mac Book laptops it’s the same controller, which will cause major, unrecoverable data recovery problems in the coming months… This type of controller encrypts data access with 128-bit encryption. All it takes is for the controller to be damaged, and there is then no solution for decrypting access to the data.
- Furthermore, the SSD supports a limited number of read-write and erase cycles, which is a major drawback compared to the conventional hard drive. Flash memory cells wear out as they are used and do not retain data indefinitely; as a result, they tend to erase themselves after only a few years, without warning the user. This often leaves no trace at all, unlike a mechanical hard drive.
In short, if you still want to try an SSD to start up a computer 10 times faster than with a conventional hard drive, then we recommend keeping a second mechanical hard drive to store your working data more reliably. Favor Marvell controllers, Intel and Samsung… This is rarely printed on the box of the SSD or rotating SATA drive you buy; you have to dig up the product specifications online, on the manufacturer’s website, to get this kind of information. But as you will have understood, we do not recommend the Sandforce controller.
If you would like to learn more about SSDs and discover how they work at their core, we have selected the following expert video from our YouTube channel dedicated to data recovery:
Photo source: FlashData