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Editor:-
if the
flash SSD market
reaches the levels of penetration predicted by many
analysts - then in a
handful of years nearly half of all new notebook PCs will use flash SSDs instead
of hard disk drives.
What
happens when those SSDs inevitably fail - and there's no
backup?
Most
consumers don't do regular backups - and most small businesses don't either.
When
hard drives fail, get
submerged in
water or get damaged in fires - the solution of last resort - is to call a
data recovery company.
These superheroes can often recover a lot of data - even if the pcbs
and chips in the disk drive have been damaged. Superheroes don't come cheap.
The cost for a difficult recovery can run into thousands of dollars (for a
single disk) but for many satisfied customers that's a much better result than
being left with no business or months of lost time rewriting reports, novels
etc.
Although flash SSDs are new to the consumer market - they've been
around for many
years in markets which absolutely needed their levels of ruggedness (and
could bear the high cost). So you may be thinking that there's a well
established industry already out there ready to process your flash SSD - if you
are unlucky enough to need a data recovery service today.
You would be
wrong.
The reason is that the biggest traditional customers of flash
SSDs have been the military
or industrial users who didn't want enemies / competitors stealing their
secrets.
Erstwhile flash SSD manufacturers like
Adtron,
BiTMICRO and
STEC specialised in
having on-board
disk sanitization
of various forms to make sure that that the data is never recovered by the wrong
people.
So there isn't an established data recovery market track
record for flash SSDs in those applications which have been around the
longest.
The nearest that the market has to offer - is experience
with recovering data from simple
flash memory storage
(like USB keyring style
devices or camera memory cards). Unlike SSDs - those devices aren't designed for
intensive write applications - and there is nothing very complicated between the
interface controller and the flash chips themselves. So if the controller gets
zapped by static - or crunched by your car driving over it - the data is
relatively easy for experts to recover from the flash chips.
That isn't
the case with most flash SSDs - which use complicated
controller technology
to extend the reliability
and speed of storage. The architecture inside a high performance SSD is more
complicated than that in most
RAID systems. The
algorithms which map addresses to physical media locations vary from
manufacturer to manufacturer - and in many cases - like the
formula for making
Coke or Pepsi - the details are closely guarded commercial secrets.
Look
at the server market and data recovery (at the single SSD level) is not a
burning issue for datacenter applications - because most often the SSDs operate
in some kind of RAID
protected array - and are also backed up (internally or externally) to other
disks.
One thing
missing in the consumer
notebook SSD
market is a clear signal by oems - that data in their devices can be easily
recovered - if there is no backup - or the backup failed. Maybe the next
generation of products will address that issue. It would be another way of
segmenting the consumer flash SSD market - and a market need and opportunity
which hasn't been understood by SSD product marketers at the close of 2008.
Although
flash SSDs are inherently much more
reliable than hard
drives - that's no consolation for the customers who will be the pioneers in SSD
data recovery.
...Later:- years after I started talking to
traditional data recovery companies about this subject - the first glimmerings
of a new market emerged. See side-bar for news on the right. | |
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