History of SSD (solid-state drive)

The origins of SSDs came from the 1950s using two similar technologies, magnetic core memory and card capacitor read-only store (CCROS). These auxiliary memory units, as they were called at the time, emerged during the era of vacuum tube computers. But with the introduction of cheaper drum storage units, their use was discontinued.

Later, in the 1970s and 1980s, SSDs were implemented in semiconductor memory for early supercomputers of IBM, Amdahl and Cray; however, the prohibitively high price of the built-to-order SSDs made them quite seldom used. In the late 1970s, General Instruments produced an electrically alterable

ROM (EAROM) which operated somewhat like the later NAND flash memory, but the inability to achieve a 10-year life was not practical and many companies abandoned the technology.

The Sharp PC-5000, introduced in 1983, used 128 kilobyte solid-state storage cartridges, containing bubble memory. In 1984 Tallgrass Technologies Corporation had a tape back up unit of 40 MB with a solid state 20 MB unit built in. The 20 MB unit could be used instead of a hard drive.[citation needed] In September 1986, Santa Clara Systems introduced BatRam, 4 megabyte (MB) mass storage system expandable to 20 MB using 4 MB memory modules. The package included a rechargeable battery to preserve the memory chip contents when the array was not powered. 1987, saw the entry of EMC Corporation into the SSD market, with drives introduced for the mini-computer market. However, by 1993 EMC had exited the SSD market. Software-based RAM Disks are still used today because they are an order of magnitude faster than the fastest SSD, but they consume CPU resources and cost much more on a per GB basis.

In 1994, STEC, Inc. bought Cirrus Logic’s flash controller operation, allowing the company to enter the flash memory business for consumer electronic devices.

In 1995, M-Systems introduced flash-based solid-state drives. They had the advantage of not requiring batteries to maintain the data in the memory (required by the prior volatile memory systems), but were not as fast as the DRAM-based solutions. Since then, SSDs have been used successfully as HDD replacements by the military and aerospace industries, as well as for other mission-critical applications. These applications require the exceptional mean time between failures (MTBF) rates that solid-state drives achieve, by virtue of their ability to withstand extreme shock, vibration and temperature ranges.

BiTMICRO made a number of introductions and announcements in 1999 around flash-based SSDs including an 18 GB 3.5 in SSD. Fusion-io announced a PCIe-based SSD with 100,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS) of performance in a single card with capacities up to 320 gigabytes in 2007. At Cebit 2009, OCZ demonstrated a 1 terabyte (TB) flash SSD using a PCI Express ×8 interface. It achieves a maximum write speed of 654 megabytes per second (MB/s) and maximum read speed of 712 MB/s. In December 2009, Micron Technology announced the world's first SSD using a 6 gigabits per second (Gbit/s) or 600 (MB/s) SATA interface.