Speedy SSDs increasingly favoured despite difficulties

Adoption expanding but 21 per cent say they returned or replaced drives in past year

Kroll Ontrack says more firms seem to be adopting SSD and expanding their deployment, although a significant proportion have also reported problems with data erasure, reliability and cost.

The data recovery firm based its claims on an online poll of 253 UK-based CIOs, CTOs and IT managers in August. "Eighty-two per cent of these UK CIOs, CTOs and IT managers predicted that their use of SSD technology will increase over the next 12 months," it wrote in a related announcement.

"However, 21 per cent of IT leaders polled said they had returned or replaced an SSD drive in the past year, and, of these, 30 per cent found that permanent data erasure from SSDs was more difficult than from traditional HDDs."

Sixty-eight per cent of those who indicated they had chosen not to use SSDs in the last 12 months said it was because they were too expensive.

Nine per cent said they avoided SSD because it was too difficult to recover data from them, and three per cent said their reason for avoiding them was because they could not be safely erased and reused.

"The predicted rise in SSD adoption over the next 12 months and the low levels of awareness about the relative difficulties of either restoring or erasing data from SSD heralds massive problems for organisations in the years ahead," according to Kroll.

Its data recovery engineers have indicated that the proprietary design and architecture used by the hundreds of manufacturers that make SSD is a big part of the problem.

"In contrast to HDDs, there is no standard toolkit that can be used with SSDs, so organisations need to ensure that they work with a specialist provider," the company said.

So why were some opting for SSD anyway? According to Kroll's poll, 92 per cent of those who responded said speed was the attractant.

"Sixteen per cent believed SSDs to be more reliable than HDDs, while 18 per cent said they chose SSDs simply because they liked to work with leading-edge technology," the firm wrote.

In the survey, 82 per cent said that up to 25 per cent of their data was stored on SSD, and 13 per cent said that 26-50 per cent of storage was SSD. Five per cent stored 51-75 per cent of their data via SSD.

Most used SSD on desktops or laptops; just 12 per cent had adopted SSD for server storage.