Digital video recording onto solid-state disks: feasibility and lifetime estimation

Digital video recording (DVR) has become a very popular consumer technology. Traditionally based on hard disk drives (that is, rotating magnetic disks), DVR places great demands on the storage system in terms of bandwidth and operating temperatures, with a consequent impact on reliability. Solid-state disks (SSDs), based on NAND flash technology, have emerged as an alternative to magnetic disks. There is a clear motivation to use SSDs to do DVR, but there are severe reliability issues that must be addressed in order to make this possible. This outlines the issues associated with NAND-flash-based DVR and derives expressions for the usable lifetime of SSD-based DVR in a handheld / mobile application.