Since the inception of computers, developersand users alike have demanded new levels of speed. The first models, big asthe floor of a building and filled with vacuum tubes, left handcalculations and even adding machines in the dust. Implementation oftransistors meant many times more work could be performed in much lessspace. The integrated circuit sped things up by numerous more levels andreduced the footprint even more. Now the elimination of material barriersis on the horizon with chips doing away with circuitry altogether andperforming functions within magnetic fields.
##CONTINUE##Storage of data has evolved similarly. Data was originally -- andtentatively -- held in special electronic tubes. Punch cards were also anearly contender, and were still in use into the 1970s. Other methods havecome along and remained with us, such as magnetic tape and compact disks.The first hard drives were invented and found their way into use in themid-1950s, and hence have been around in successive generations for over 50years -- a long time in the computer industry.
As processing speed begins bumping up against material barriers, newsolutions for storage have been forced into being. The old reliablemechanical hard drive has struggled hard to even come near the speed ofelectronic circuitry of memory and CPU, and fortunately is now beingreplaced with drives of the same composition. Flash drives, otherwise knownas solid state drives or SSDs, come much closer to their memory and CPUcousins and hence can provide data at much higher speeds.
At first glance, it would appear that flash drives would not suffer fromthe disease familiar to hard drive users -- fragmentation. Butunfortunately, this is not the case.
Files are saved to SSDs by the same file system -- NTFS -- that saves datato hard drives. Common to all Microsoft Windows operating systems, NTFS isoptimized for hard drives but not for SSDs. Because of this, NTFS savesdata to flash drives in such a way that free space is rapidly fragmented.Write performance degrades by as much as 80 percent, and begins to manifestwithin a month or so of normal use.
Flash rives also have a limited number of erase-write cycles, andincreasing the occurrence of erases and writes wears out the SSD faster.The fragmentation of free space causes a greater number of erase-writecycles, thereby shortening the life of the drive.
This problem is corrected by employing a solution that optimizes an SSD'sfree space. Utilizing such a solution, write performance is brought back toa high-speed level and kept there, and once the solution has been inoperation a short time, the normal-use write-erase activity becomessubstantially reduced. Performance is maximized, and the life of the driveis lengthened.
As we move into the higher-speed future, make sure the fragmentation isn'tslowing you down.
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BY Bruce Boyers
Source：International Business Times
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