Solid-state drive (SSD)
A non-volatile storage device built from flash memory or other solid-state media with no moving parts.
An SSD persists data in non-volatile semiconductor memory—almost always NAND flash—behind a controller that maps logical blocks to physical pages, runs wear leveling and garbage collection, and presents a block or NVMe namespace interface. There are no seeking heads: latency and IOPS come from parallel flash channels and the host protocol (SATA, SAS, or NVMe/PCIe). Cell type (SLC/MLC/TLC/QLC), over-provisioning, and power-loss protection differentiate client vs enterprise SKUs more than the generic “SSD” label. Hosts should issue TRIM/deallocate so the controller can reclaim invalidated pages and limit write amplification. SSDs dominate boot, hot, and latency-sensitive tiers; HDDs still win bulk cold capacity.
Relations
- related
- nand-flash, nvme, sata, enterprise-ssd, consumer-ssd, ftl