SSD Survey Highlights Misconceptions About Encryption & Performance

COLORADO SPRINGS, Co. -- A survey by the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) launched last fall has revealed some interesting user perceptions regarding the characteristics of solid state drives (SSDs), including their endurance expectations and their lack of interest in using built-in encryption features.

Paul Wassenberg, chair of SNIAs Solid State Storage Initiative (SSSI) said the results of the survey will be used to guide the groups education activities around the capabilities and features of SSDs. The call for input began last fall. Initial results, comprising 75% of the ultimate total of participants, were presented at the Storage Visions Conference earlier this year.

The survey identified respondents in four market segments, namely the mobile, desktop, server, and storage subsystem segments. Within each segment, SSD uses were broken down based on applications as well as interfaces being used. Overall, the highest use of SSDs is in storage subsystems -- by approximately 33%, with servers at roughly 27%, and mobile at around 21%. Desktop use of SSDs was about 8%. The majority, approximately 65%, were using the using the 2.5-inch form factor, 19% were using PCIe cards, and less than 5% were using mSATA. Capacity-wise, about 33% of respondents were using SSDs greater than 500 GB, followed closely by about 31% using between 301 and 500 GB.

The SSSI survey focused on five key attributes of SSDs -- performance, power, endurance, data integrity, and data encryption. While the ratings varied depending on the segment and uses, across all segments performance was fairly important, with IOPS and latency favored over throughput. Power was fairly important, but power management received only middling ratings.

Wassenberg said endurance was most important of all attributes for users, who consistently ranked it above all else. Data integrity and encryption were rated as fairly important, but the latter less so than anticipated. Wassenberg said this was notable, since comments from the survey revealed some outdated data ideas that encryption can reduce performance. That isnt true, he said, because recent generations of self-encrypting drives (SEDs) do not measurably impact SSD performance.

Key management is also a concern in larger systems with multiple drives, the survey found. Wassenberg said mobile devices, such as notebooks PCs, are particularly vulnerable to theft, and encryption would prevent the data from being accessed. Many SSDs being shipped today have data protection and encryption features built in, but often those abilities are not being switched on by OEMs.

Samsung, for example, recently added new security features to its self-encrypting drive (SED), the 840 EVO SSD, making it compatible with professional security software employed by enterprise organizations. In addition, there are a number of third-party vendors such as WinMagic and Wave Systems that offer tools to make SEDs easier for IT departments to deploy and manage while not degrading the performance of SSDs and or complicating the user experience.

Wassenberg said educating users on encryption technologies for SSDs and the benefits will be a focus for the SSSI going forward. Another area of education will be performance, he said, and the importance of preconditioning drives so that users have better expectations of how a drive performs over time. An SSDs performance is higher fresh out of the box, but it will drop after several writes, and then give a more realistic indication of how it will likely perform over time.

The SSSI offers test specification, specifications and software that allow users to test workloads and maintain industry-standard methodology for pre-conditioning and steady state determination for SSDs.

For now, the SSSI survey is going to be kept open for an indefinite period to gather more data, and users are welcome to participate in a dedicated LinkedIn group.

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SSD Survey Highlights Misconceptions About Encryption & Performance