How To Explain Flash Storage To A Five-Year-Old

Flash storage, first invented by Toshiba in the 1980s, literally revolutionised computing. Without it, none of us would have smartphones or USB sticks small enough to carry around in our pockets every day. But in more recent times, flash has breached the data centre and is currently in the middle of a heated battle between storage vendors. But what actually is flash storage? Here’s the concept explained by various industry experts:

Pure Storage gets deep with buckets. The company explains:

“Flash memory can seem complex on the surface, but there’s a good analogy I always use to help explain it. It starts with the idea that in the physical world, water and electricity behave in similar ways.

“When you take a photo on your phone, the picture is stored or “written” to the phone’s memory, which in essence, is much like flash memory.

“Flash memory is composed of big blocks of silicon which fill up as information is stored. Think of one of these blocks as a row of buckets that can hold water. Let’s call a full bucket “1” and an empty bucket “0.”  When your photo is saved, it’s saved as a collection of 1s and 0s. That represents a number of full and empty buckets across the block.

“Each time a bucket has water poured into it, it also punches a tiny hole in the bottom. Over time, as more water is poured, the number of holes increases and the bucket becomes less able to hold water until it can’t store any more. This is similar to when flash memory “wears out.”

“Here’s where it gets clever: if you devise an algorithm so that buckets only fill up when absolutely necessary, and all buckets get filled at the same pace, holes form less easily, and thus the buckets take a very, very long time to wear out.

“Put another way: Algorithms, code, or software, are key to getting the most out of flash. When you minimise how much and how often water is going into the buckets you prevent a leakage rendering the buckets useless. Software does this for flash memory.”

Sean Horne, CTO for Enterprise and Mid Range Storage at EMC explains flash storage with a music box. He says:

“Imagine you want to play a song and you have an old music box and an iPod.

“With the music box, you need to wind it up and the metal keys inside the box will move at different rates to produce the sound. It will also only be able to play one type of song. This is what traditional storage is like.

“Flash storage is more like an iPod. If you want to play a song, you press one button and the music will play. There are no moving parts inside the iPod; instead all the information is stored digitally. You can also store lots of songs on to one iPod as there is more space because it is kept as digital information. Imagine all the information about the songs being squashed to fit into the iPod. This is all possible because no metal keys are needed to move to make the music play. Imagine how many music boxes you would need to play the hundred’s on songs on your iPod.

“The lack of moving parts means Flash storage is more trust worthy and is less likely to break down. It also means it is faster and more reliable when you want to access your music / information. Imagine if you could take all the records in a record store like HMV and put them all into an iPod, then on the same iPod put all the video’s in the video rental store, that’s what silicon flash does for you.”

Chris Buckel, sales consulting manager at Violin Memory, explains:

“Imagine you are standing in a playground with your eyes shut. Some of your friends are spinning round on a big roundabout right in front of you and you want to reach out to give your best friend a high five. Because you can’t see where your best friend is, at the moment you put your hand out they might be just about to fly past you (in which case you don’t have to wait) or they might be all the way round the other side of the roundabout (in which case you have to wait ages with your hand out until they get to you). Every time you put your hand out there is a chance you will have to wait while the roundabout spins to the right place – and if you try this experiment enough times there’s a good chance you will get an arm ache.

“When computers want to store or fetch information they use things called hard drives which contain little metal disks that spin round all the time. These disks work just like your roundabout in that you have to wait for them to spin to the right place before your computer can get the information it wants – making your computer run very slowly. And as everybody knows, slow computers are very, very boring.

“Flash Memory is a new technology, which uses tiny amounts of electricity to store information without the need for spinning disks or moving parts; everything is fixed in place, which is why some people call it “solid state”. Because nothing moves, it uses less power and takes up less space. But most importantly of all it’s much faster, which means your computer goes faster too. You might not realise, but flash memory is already used inside phones, iPads and cameras to store all your pictures, music and videos.

“So now, instead of the roundabout, imagine all your friends are stood around you so that you can high five each one without having to wait. Thanks to flash memory, you’ll no longer get the arm ache you used to get waiting for disk. Although your hand might now hurt from all those super fast high fives…”

Martin Cooper, technical director, SolidFire, says:

“Think about storage like a magic box where all your online games, the Internet, TV and everything played on your iPad are kept for safe keeping. A lot of people are stuck with old magic boxes that take up a lot of room, make a lot of noise because you can hear everything moving inside them, and play games and videos very slowly if there are too many of them in the box.

“In comparison, flash storage is the super-hero of magic boxes. It’s much smaller – the size of a few Lego bricks – so doesn’t take up too much room in your bedroom. Like Lego bricks, you can also easily connect flash storage pieces to each other so you can store even more things. And regardless of how many pieces you put together, you can get your stuff out just as easily as you did before.  It’s also much quieter, so won’t keep you up at night when you’re trying to sleep.

“Flash storage also uses a lot less electricity than traditional storage, so you’re effectively helping save the planet. If storage was like a car, flash storage would be an electric one and in the future, they will eventually replace all the petrol ones.”

Finally, Nigel Edwards, VP EMEA sales for HGST, explains:

“Every day, all over the world people use computers to communicate with each other. When you talk to someone normally, you hear what they say and remember it using your brain. But when people use electronic things to talk to each other, everything they say has to be stored and remembered in a different way. One way people do this is to store things on disks like really fast CDs, but these disks need to be plugged in and turned on all the time to keep the information inside. Keeping electronic things on all the time is expensive, which is why people turn their TVs off when they aren’t watching them, but you can’t do that with memory disks; if you turn them off they will forget everything they learnt. So people have invented something called flash storage, which can remember things even when it’s not plugged in and turned on.”

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