the Fastest SSDs - in all form factors

• the degree of parallelization in the memory array and the bandwidth of the internal memory bus.
  
  Although everyone has access to similar RAM or flash chips - how you connect up the internal memory array can make a 10 to 1 performance difference in commercially available SSDs - depending on what the designer had in mind as the main market. That pushes some complexity and constraints back onto the SSD controller and makes it more complex / expensive. The complexity caused by virtualizing the SSD due to internal constraints (such as physical memory block sizes) becomes greater - for flash - above about x10 to x50. It is possible to solve that problem with more complexity in the host interface cache - but then other factors start to impose constraints such as avoiding a high volume of spurious block writes which could impact endurance.

• the implementation of the SSD controller and host bus interface.
  
  Just as in RAID controllers you get a wide range of performance in the market depending how oems have chosen to implement critical functions (speed versus power, speed versus cost, programmable architecture versus hard wired etc) you get similar tradeoffs in an SSD product. But unlike a host bus adapter designed for use with slow hard disks the impact of the SSD controller is much more visible as an intrinsic limiter or enabler of key performance attributes.

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