Re:Samsung's 970 EVO SSDs Reviewed – 500GB and 1TB
by londons_explore on Wednesday April 25, 2018 @08:59AM
(#16921098)
SD cards are the same. Many cards you can unplug from the host, only to find something that successfully fsync()'ed actually wasn't persisted to the underlying storage.
When the OS flushes stuff to the device, it is done such that metadata writes reach the disk in an order that ensures a recoverable filesystem image on power failure. If the device does not preserve that ordering all bets are off. The mapping that goes on inside a SSD is of sufficient complexity that it's much easier to simply guarantee the device has enough independent power to ensure all acknowledged writes are persisted after acknowledgement, and that means capacitors, or best case, data (e.g. committed, acked DB transactions) that magically disappear during a power loss event.
You cannot have a device that temporarily writes to RAM and tells the host computer "OK that's on disk now" (i.e. every SSD in existence with a throughput exceeding a few MB/sec) be reliable without an independent source of power to ensure that RAM reaches flash in every situation