Industrial-grade SSD is a hard disk made from an array of solid-state electronic memory chips, and is composed of a control unit and a storage unit. How to choose the right industrial-grade SSD?
1. Capacity
An industrial-grade SSD should not be selected simply based on the amount of data it will store. Industrial-grade SSD performance is typically measured in input/output operations per second (IOPS) and read/write bandwidth (MB/sec).
Much like a hard drive, this data is affected by capacity. Performance, especially IOPS, increases with capacity due to the aggregation of bandwidth and the physical number of NAND chips that increase with capacity.
At present, the storage capacity of industrial-grade SSD ranges from 64GB to 1TB, and professional suppliers provide multi-TB products. If you exceed 256GB, the price will increase with the increase in capacity. Industrial-grade SSDs with capacities between 128GB and 256GB are relatively cost-effective.
2. Size
The vast majority of industrial-grade SSDs on the market come in 2.5-inch format, which means they will also fit most laptops. "Drive Adapters" are also available for installing industrial-grade SSDs into 3.5-inch drive bays.
3. Reliability
When it comes to the life of industrial-grade SSDs, there are two factors to consider-the reliability of the NAND memory chip and the controller chip.
NAND flash memory is a mature technology, and semiconductor giants such as Intel, Samsung and Toshiba have spent years honing their skills to produce reliable chips. However, industrial-grade SSD controllers are more important in terms of reliability.
4. Warranty
Industrial-grade SSDs typically have a three-year warranty, which is comparable to that offered by hard drive manufacturers, making NAND flash chips a relatively useless indicator of long-term reliability.
Currently, the warranty period provided by the manufacturer has little to do with the durability of NAND flash memory chips. At this stage, it's much more prudent to make a purchasing decision based on potential reliability. It's best not to be an early adopter and wait a few months for the industrial SSD manufacturer to resolve any industrial SSD controller firmware bugs that may exist.
5. NAND memory types
Industrial-grade SSDs use NAND flash memory chips to replace the platters in hard drives. While other types of flash memory exist, NAND flash memory currently has the right balance of price, performance, and reliability, making it the preferred choice for industrial-grade SSDs.
NAND flash memory is composed of cells that can be layered. Single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash can store a single bit of data, while multi-level cell (MLC) can store multiple bits in a single cell, meaning storage density can be greatly increased.
6. Interface
Industrial-grade SSDs use the same external interfaces as hard drives, SATA being the most common. In addition to the SATA interface, there are also M.2 interfaces and mSATA.
