The board solid-state drive, commonly referred to as the BSSD, is an implementation of a regular

SSD A solid-state drive (SSD) is a solid-state storage device that uses integrated circuit assemblies to store data persistently, typically using flash memory, and functioning as secondary storage in the hierarchy of computer storage. It is ...

, but in a different form factor and packaging, which is perhaps optimized for certain aspects of the storage device, such as cost or

density Density (volumetric mass density or specific mass) is the substance's mass per unit of volume. The symbol most often used for density is ''ρ'' (the lower case Greek letter rho), although the Latin letter ''D'' can also be used. Mathematicall ...

. The term ''board'' in BSSD refers to the printed circuit

board Board or Boards may refer to: Flat surface * Lumber, or other rigid material, milled or sawn flat ** Plank (wood) ** Cutting board ** Sounding board, of a musical instrument * Cardboard (paper product) * Paperboard * Fiberboard ** Hardboa ...

(PCB), from references to on-board SSDs. While a regular

also contains a

PCB PCB may refer to: Science and technology * Polychlorinated biphenyl, an organic chlorine compound, now recognized as an environmental toxin and classified as a persistent organic pollutant * Printed circuit board, a board used in electronics * ...

, the packaging of the SSD physically encloses the PCB inside it, making it more easy to handle the storage device, since the packing protects the PCB from the damaging effects electro static discharge. BSSDs, however, keep the PCB exposed (thereby reducing cost, increasing density, etc.), but however requiring special care in handling it, by use of devices such as, the

antistatic wrist strap An antistatic device is any device that reduces, dampens, or otherwise inhibits electrostatic discharge, or ESD, which is the buildup or discharge of static electricity. ESD can damage electrical components such as computer hard drives, and even i ...

. While such care in handling is not any different from that required when replacing the graphics adapter in a computer slot, it does restrict the uses of BSSDs to data center uses and makes it unsuitable for consumer applications.

Hardware Interconnect

Multiple BSSDs are housed in a

disk enclosure A disk enclosure is a specialized casing designed to hold and power disk drives while providing a mechanism to allow them to communicate to one or more separate computers. Drive enclosures provide power to the drives therein and convert the da ...

that connect to the

storage server In computing, a file server (or fileserver) is a computer attached to a network that provides a location for shared disk access, i.e. storage of computer files (such as text, image, sound, video) that can be accessed by the workstations that are ab ...

via SAS or some other interconnect.

Software Interface

The BSSD comes under the umbrella of block data storage, as does the regular SSD and uses

logical block addressing Logical block addressing (LBA) is a common scheme used for specifying the location of blocks of data stored on computer storage devices, generally secondary storage systems such as hard disk drives. LBA is a particularly simple linear addressi ...

References

{{reflist Solid-state computer storage