As early as the year 1956, the computer giant IBM released the world’s first mechanical hard disk drive (HDD) with rotating magnetic discs. Since then, the basic principles of magnetic storage disks have changed very little. What has changed are the demands now placed upon the mechanical components of this technology. Instead of its original capacity of a modest 5 megabytes, today’s HDDs require storage capacities of multiple terabytes in order to keep up with ever increasing data loads. Over the years, the access time of these mechanical storage plates has failed to keep up with these demands. While the performance aspects of most computing matters, like processing power or system bus speed, have increased many times over in recent decades, standard magnetic storage disks are slowly but surely reaching a performance bottleneck of sorts. This situation is making it increasingly difficult to process more and more data at faster rates, and experts predict that conventional hard drives will soon abdicate their dominant position to alternative storage systems. What’s fueling this change is that the highly promising successor to this model, the flash-based solid-state drive (SSD), is already well in the works. For servers, using SSD storage is no longer considered to be an approach relegated to the fringes of the IT world. This is due in part to the recent arrival of more affordable options on the market, but also because of an increased number of read and write accesses. What’s more, the durability of SSD storage devices has also been adjusted to match the standards of those found on traditional hard drives.