The modern world is heavily data-oriented and is reliant on technology that provides easy, fast and secure access to high volumes of data. In the past, hard disk drives (HDDs) were relied on for storage. Increasingly, Solid-State Drives (SSDs) are used. They provide much faster access than HDDs and, as they have no moving parts, reliability is much higher.
Solid state memory (SSM) is either volatile or non-volatile memory (NVM). Of these, the former is used extensively in compute-intensive applications. For example, dynamic RAM (DRAM) is a popular volatile memory type because it is a relatively low-cost way of giving a system ‘workspace’. However, the ‘dynamic’ aspect refers to how it needs to be constantly refreshed, a few times every second. If power is lost before the ‘work’ can be moved to NVM then all is lost.