The healthcare industry faces a number of ever-increasing challenges, most notably relating to budgets and expenses. While costs are rising on all fronts across the sector, one area that industry members may want to focus on is equipment. Medical machinery is becoming more complex, resulting in a higher price tag and more funding needed to invest in the latest and best treatment tools. According to a study conducted by Lucintel, global spending on medical equipment will increase at a compound annual growth rate of 4.1 percent through 2017. At the time, the global medical equipment industry is predicted to be worth $93.6 billion.

The amount of capital dedicated to investing in new medical equipment should give healthcare officials pause, particularly regarding what happens to these machines once they have been installed. If this hardware is not properly configured or set up with the best components available, it may suffer from performance issues or be prone to outages. Not only will this translate into a poor use of hospital resources, but it could also impede medical staff’s ability to provide quality treatment to patients.

Given the high stakes involved in the operation of medical equipment, hospitals need to be certain that they have the underlying components to properly support these machines. Data storage devices, in particular, present concerns if the right tools are not selected. Traditional disk-based devices rely on internal moving parts that can be easily disrupted and damaged. This will prevent sensitive equipment from functioning properly and could dramatically affect the quality of treatment offered by a hospital.

From a performance perspective, high-quality SSDs far outclass other options, as their flash memory allows data to be written or read as quickly as possible. This ensures that for extremely sensitive machines, they will continue to run accurately without harmful disruptions. Hospital networks are becoming increasingly complex, requiring every component to be finely tuned and function effectively. A number of critical devices rely on their storage solutions to continue performing without incident. This machinery may include patient monitoring systems and image testing equipment. Without an excellent SSD in place to seamlessly handle data read/write processes, this complex hardware may encounter performance errors that could impair their functionality and impede staff efforts to provide excellent care.

Durability required in critical environments
As KnownHost explained, organizations can benefit immensely by switching to a solid state drive for all of their data storage needs regarding high-performance and sensitive machinery. Because SSDs do not operate on movable parts, they are not vulnerable to the same durability issues as disk-based alternatives. SSD drives run on NAND flash memory, which is far more reliable for extended use. Even the most advanced HDD will be susceptible to the wear and tear of physical operations. The read/write heads that disk-based storage tools utilize will break down over time, either due to a gradual diminishing of their internal components or from sudden trauma.

The best SSDs on the market have robust features designed to enhance their durability and increase their lifespan. DIGISTOR’s industrial-grade SSD drives contain processors with higher-level BCH ECC algorithms that reduce the potential for data to be incorrectly written to the cell memory. This error correction code functionality ensures that critical data is kept intact and prevents bits of information to be lost or corrupted during the read/write process. Healthcare officials should take note of such robust features when choosing an SSD drive as not all products on the market will have them. A poorly constructed SSD will ultimately provide little upside over a traditional solution.

DIGISTOR’s industrial line of SSD drives also offer monitoring capabilities that enable personnel to check the status of their crucial components and identify potentially disruptive issues before they become more significant problems. With the S.M.A.R.T. monitoring system that comes packaged with every DIGISTOR Industrial SSD, key performance indicators can be viewed at anytime, allowing workers to identify and fix such issues early on. This foresight will prevent a number of costly operational disruptions from occurring with an organization’s healthcare equipment.

When choosing a storage device for sensitive and complex hardware that is tasked with critical responsibilities, it’s essential that healthcare authorities do their homework and look beyond off-the-shelf options. Those products may not contain the array of features needed to ensure long-term durability. DIGISTOR Industrial SSDs have the unparalleled robustness and performance needed to excel in a healthcare environment.