As they come down in price, more and more private consumers and commercial enterprises are adopting solid state disks (SSD) as a primary form of data storage.
SSDs offer certain benefits over conventional (spinning disk) HDDs. SSDs provide the convenience of high speed data access to desktop consumers running IO-intensive applications. On the business side, they provide lower latency – a measurable thumbs-up for the performance of time-sensitive applications commonly seen in commercial and industrial applications.
However, with all the benefits that SSDs bring, they are still susceptible to weaknesses inherent to the systems they serve. For consumers and enterprises requiring long-term and highly available (HA) performance, being able to eliminate or reduce the effects of unexpected power loss is on the top of the priority list. Reliability technology can be divided into two camps. The first one following an abnormal power shutdown is to retain several copies of important data and restore the last backup when the current data set becomes corrupted. While this mechanism can ensure the integrity of data recently written to storage, all data changes made from the last full write is lost.
Within modern SSD hardware, Power Loss Protection (PLP) is the latest key technology that answers unexpected power outages. By leveraging both firmware and hardware to protect important data when encountering abnormal power spikes or outages, PLP kicks in when you most need it.
To solve this problem, a second method (used by ADATA) is to combine sensitive voltage monitors with banks of power-retaining capacitors. ADATA’s PLP supplies its SSDs with enough power to continue buffered read-write operations until completion. When a power loss occurs, the power monitor circuit detects the power drop and instructs the controller to back up all data in the buffer before the power drains from the capacitor banks. Using this method, all important data is saved without corruption. To ensure long-term high availability (HA) service, ADATA SSDs also incorporate special SMART attributes to monitor the ongoing health of your SSDs’ power capacitors.
By using ADATA SSDs your business enterprise and industrial activities can enjoy ongoing HA while leveraging the low latency benefits that only the fastest SSDs can offer.
For more information on ADATA Technology SSDs offering Power Loss Protection, please see: