Solid-State Drives (SSDs) [Scanning the Issue]

The articles in this special issue cover all the most recent advances in the solid-state drive field from both hardware and software/firmware perspectives. If we look at the DRAM history, DRAM data access speeds have increased at a faster rate than HDDs. The gap in read and write performances between DRAM and HDD has widened in the last years, leaving an opportunity for a new intermediate memory/storage technology between HDDs and DRAM: nand Flash-based SSDs can fill this performance gap, thus profoundly changing the traditional memory hierarchy below the microprocessor.