Unlike volatile RAM, a well-made SSD is meant to look after itself and your data. That means the ideal state for your industrial SSD is actually powered up! In fact, apart from any abnormal environmental stresses, such as exposure to static, extreme cooling or heat, your industrial SSD is designed to self-maintain for many years. But if a powered up state is optimum, and powered down doesn’t create any wear and tear, when is your SSD most at risk?

Getting from one state to another is when an SSD is its most defenseless.

While the drive writes very quickly, an unexpected power loss creates a moment of intrinsic risk for flash storage for two main reasons:

1. SSDs perform more read/ write intensive tasks than HDDs: Because an industrial SSD is responsible for more complex internal data management and housekeeping, at any given point in operation, your SSD is likely performing vital tasks. With complexity comes risk, and it’s imperative that the SSD’s designer thoroughly design in what should happen in the short period of time in which circuits can still respond to controls.
2. There can be billions of bytes in an industrial SSD: Many getting accessed faster than the speed possible by a spinning disk hard drive. All of this action must be managed when the industrial SSD system changes states.

This means an SSD must use a wider range of power control schemes to protect against possible power drop offs during the write operation to the NAND Flash.

How to get it right?

Designers of high-quality industrial SSDs understand that some data corruption is possible when power is interrupted – despite the best efforts of the SSD’s manufacturer.

But the key to creating a reliable and durable industrial SSD goes beyond design, to testing: Applying variable types of power disruptions at any times in the SSD firmware.

A top-end industrial SSD has been designed and tested to make the difference between how much data in your SSD is corrupted and whether the SSD itself is usable when the power comes back up.

If you’d like to learn more about Digistor’s industrial SSD solutions, call our sales team at 1(800) 816-1886.