I am working on a embedded system where there can be unexpected power losses. So far it has been using a Corsair F80 SSD with Windows Embedded Standard 7 (NTFS), and after a unexpected power loss there were some issues that required the OS to be reinstalled. This is not ideal.
This may not be the right spot for this question, but I can imagine this is an issue that needs to be handled in data centers etc as well.
My question is thus; what SSD would you recommend using, that has sufficient protection against power loss to ensure that a clean boot can be expected when power is regained? There is no need for high write/read speeds.
I have been reading about Intel 710 and 320, as well as Seagate Enterprise SSDs, Kingston SSDNow E100 and Samsung 840 Pro, but the details on the power loss protection is in most cases quite lacking.
Best Answer
The power loss protection measures in SSDs are limited to their own cache. When SSDs use a volatile SDRAM-based write cache as a measure of performance optimization, appropriately sized supercaps would provide power for long enough to get the contents of this cache flushed into the non-volatile NAND cells of the disks.
This however would not necessarily protect your OS from being unable to start after a power outage. While NTFS supports journaling for metadata to ensure that the filesystem remains in a consistent state even after an outage event, the data itself is not protected by the journal and is flushed to disk after a certain delay (mainly for performance reasons so writes would benefit from the cache).
If your disk is not badly designed and would return on synchronous writes even when the data is only written to volatile memory, you should be able to alleviate the problem by disabling the write cache for the disk in Windows device manager.