Why can't we overclock solid state drives

Mitzy

Mitzy

Mitzy

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Serious question.

I could understand no possibility with HDDs but SSD's I would image could potentially be OC'd. So why aren't we figuring out ways to do this?
 
Flash memory is limited by a fundamental access time: for 25nm Intel flash it takes 50 microseconds to read 8kB; this translates to 156MB/s, per NAND chip (with typically 8 or 16 NAND chips per SSD that can be accessed in parallel). Yet typical SSD sequential read speeds are 200-400MB/s.

So, in theory, there is still scope for improving SSD controllers (as well as the SATA interface/host adapter) even further. But, for present drives, it's unlikely that there's anything useful that could be tuned by the user that the manufacturers have not already considered. I suspect that the cost and complexity of the SSD controller sets these boundaries on performance.

so unless you can make your own controller or board or write your own bios instructions, can't see how you could hope to achieve any real gains, apart from raid0 etc or setup a ram drive for the sdd to use, as normal ram can be 20x faster than sdd so that could be your answer?
 
Ah cheers zak, the thought just popped into my head. I remember reading a about drives having a processor contained in (part of the controller) and figured the juice could be turned up.

Thanks for the explanation, basically the drives are as tuned as they can be already for whatever fabrication process they're made by.
 
TheVoice said:
Why would you want to overclock (and potentially destabilise) something you rely on to store data?
Click to expand...

Lots of people overclock to see where the limits lie, they're not messes scarily worried about corrupting anything.

iPhone autocorrect at play.
 
Pretty much hitting the limits of Sata 6Gbps anyway, so if you're wanting more throughput you'd be best going with Raid0 :)
 
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