4 ms·

What I don’t understand is why don’t all SSD have capacitors/power protection.

• wtallis 8y ago
  It's simply not needed. A majority of PCs have battery backup, and everyone uses journalling filesystems. The risk of large-scale data loss from a power failure is much smaller than the typical consumer cares about, and power loss protection capacitors make a noticeable difference in BOM.
  • imtringued 8y ago
    Journaling filesystems don't help when the SSD firmware corrupts itself from power loss.
    • wtallis 8y ago
      Sure, but SSD firmware corrupting itself from power loss is basically impossible, since the firmware is never modified during ordinary usage.
  • blattimwind 8y ago
    > journalling filesystems Journalling only protects the filesystems own structures, not user data.
    • wtallis 8y ago
      And that's all that consumers need to have protected. Preventing catastrophic data loss is adequate for consumers. Consumers don't need to ensure complete transactional consistency for writes that are in-flight at the time of an unexpected power loss; they are conditioned to expect minor loss or corruption of data that is actively being modified when power is lost. Having at most a few MB of data at risk during the rare slices of time where a consumer PC is actively writing to the disk is an acceptable risk for these use cases.