Anonymous (no@spam.com) on 9/12/08 wrote:
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>anon (anon@anon.com) on 9/12/08 wrote:
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>>>Sigh, it is trivial to store enough energy in the flash unit to commit the buffers
>>>to flash on loss of power, which is what many HDDs do right now anyway, problems with that?
>>Well that's not lying then, is it?
>
>True enough, perhaps bending the truth, the data is not committed to the primary store, but it is now guaranteed.
>
>>Do you have any documentation or evidence of this happening in SSDs anyway?
>
>There are indications that intel is doing it on the upcoming high performance SSD drives, but no proof as yet.

What indications would those be? I do not see any in the photographs of the Intel SSD PCB available in various reviews on the Web.

http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/15433

The 2nd and 3rd pictures in this article show all top and bottom side components. There is no battery. Nor is there a supercap. The largest energy storage devices appear to be capacitors and inductors for three switching regulators.

There is a DRAM, but that doesn't mean it's cache for user data. Any SSD with a sophisticated wear leveling algorithm will need temporary volatile storage for mapping information, which can be recreated by scanning the flash memory during powerup. (Otherwise the SSD would need to do an expensive pointer chase for every user read or write.)