DSM increasingly uses SSD drives in its embedded and industrial systems

Whereas until recently the price decided on the application, the SSD drives could gain many points with lower-cost offerings in recent months. In particular in the embedded area and in industrial applications, solid state disks provide significant advantages for the user thanks to their robustness and fast access times.

DSM uses well-known brands, such as Intel®, which are well suited for industrial applications and guarantee the user the usual long-term availability. The SSDs have an increased temperature range of 0° to +70° C and run completely silent.

In addition to the extended temperature range, the SSDs save up to 40 percent of power compared with traditional hard disk drives. Even in areas such as the industrial server market, the SSDs have advantages thanks to their fast response and processing times and higher IOP (input/output operation) values per second. The SSD drives are rated at maximum 6600 IOPs for random write access and maximum 35000 IOPs for read accesses. This means the solid state disks are significantly faster than a commercial HDD. The absence of moving parts greatly increases the vibration and shock resistance in the extremely harsh industrial environment.

Another advantage of solid state disks is their extreme reliability. The manufacturer specifications state an MTBF of 1.2 million hours. In addition, the magnetization deteriorates rapidly over the course of time for conventional hard disks with the subsequent possible data loss.

DSM intentionally uses the new storage media in its product areas of the embedded and industrial systems, because 80 GB is fully adequate for most applications. Control systems provide faster boot times when an SSD is installed, furthermore they are well suited for energy-saving continuous operation in the harsh industrial environment.