Solid State Storage

Updated February 2024

SNIA Compute, Memory, and Storage Initiative leads the way in advancing education on solid state drive technology standards and performance.  Their activities support the SNIA Optimize Infrastructure for Data and Transport Data Focus Areas.

 Videos explain the basics (and more) of solid state drive technology.

Conference presentations at SNIA and industry events explain the latest developments in NVMe SSDs, Ethernet SSDs, and EDSFF standards.

Check out our full SSD playlist on the SNIA Video Channel.

Solid State Drive Special Interest Group (SSD SIG)

The SSD SIG provides guidance to the marketplace on solid state drive technology via:

• SNIA webcasts, videos, white papers, blogs, and best practices documents available in the CMSI Knowledge Center.
• Support and outreach of SNIA Technical Work in solid state drives and storage, with continuously updated pages on
  • SSD Form Factors
  • NVMe SSD Classification
  • a Total Cost of Ownership Model for Storage
  • information on Endurance of NVMe, SAS, and SATA SSDs (new)
• Coordination with other industry organizations involved in SSD activities to access additional expertise and to provide a broader industry perspective for our members

Solid State Storage Performance

SSSI has developed substantial expertise in the area of SSD performance and behavior. SSDs behave very differently than HDDs, and standard HDD benchmarks will not provide a true picture of SSD performance.

• The Real World Storage Workload Performance Test Specification provides standardized analysis of in-situ target server application storage performance and standardized comparison and qualification of Datacenter storage when using Reference IO Capture Workloads as the test stimuli in RWSW tests
• The SSS Performance Test Specifications were developed by the SNIA SSS Technical Work Group (TWG) and define how to measure SSD performance in a manner that is accurate, repeatable and enables comparison between different manufacturers’ products.
• Testing is done frequently using the SSS Performance Test Specifications. The latest results can be downloaded here.
• The SSS System TWG, building on the work of the SSS TWG, is developing a specification for measuring the performance of SSS systems.
• A testing service based on the SSS Performance Test Specification is available. Details on the service are available here.
• The SSSI Workload I/O Capture Program (WIOCP) collects contemporary I/O operation performance metrics for analysis by SNIA TWGs to gain insights into workload I/O characteristics, key performance metrics, and SSSI design opportunities and considerations

Learn more about the work of the SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative by emailing askcmsi@snia.org