New Report on MLC in the
Enterprise
Editor:- November 2, 2009 -
Forward
Insights publishes a new market report this month -
SSDs: Enabling MLC
Technology in the Enterprise (price is $6,499).
The report's author
- Gregory Wong
- says "Due to demanding performance workloads, SLC technology has been the
technology of choice for SSDs in enterprise computing environments. Therefore,
it came as a surprise when in August of this year,
STEC, a leading
enterprise SSD vendor, announced that it will offer MLC based enterprise SSDs."
Are
these products aimed at niche applications or do they suggest the beginnings of
broader adoption of MLC technology in SSDs in the enterprise space? This report
provides analysis of SSD usage models and what applications could conceivably
be addressed by MLC technology. ...more
info (pdf)
See also:-
SSDs - market
analysts , Are
MLC SSDs Safe in Enterprise Apps?,
Hybrid Storage
Drives
Samsung Puts its Stamp on Consumer Flash Upgrades
Editor:-
October 16, 2009 - Samsung
is launching a branded range of
flash cards aimed at the
consumer market - initially in Taiwan.
Previously Samsung manufactured
"white-label" digital memory cards for a variety of leading
electronics companies and memory card companies.
Samsung's new premium
"Plus" memory cards, which comply with the Secure Digital class 6
ratings for performance, are available in SD, microSD and CF formats with
densities of 4GB and 8GB, with a 16GB density for an SD Plus card. Designed to
ensure that valuable data is not lost, Samsung memory cards are shock-resistant,
water-resistant and protected from damage caused by magnetic interference.
iSuppli estimates the
NAND flash-memory retail market is already worth $12 billion in revenues
annually.
Samsung Wheels Out PRAM (Problematic RAM)
Editor:-
September 22, 2009 - Samsung
today
announced
it has begun producing 512Mb PRAM memory.
PRAM
combines the speed of RAM for processing functions with the non-volatile
characteristics of flash memory for storage.
"We believe PRAM will make a highly significant contribution to
the efficiency of mobile phone designs, particularly for multimedia handsets and
smartphones," said Sei-Jin Kim, vice president, mobile memory planning and
enabling group, Memory Division, Samsung Electronics. "We expect it to
become one of our core memory products in the future."
Editor's
comments:- let's do a reality check here. This has been a Problematic
(rather than a Perfect) RAM technology. Samsung originally announced a working
prototype of the
512Mb PRAM 3 years earlier - in September 2006.
Will Flash Torch Hard Disk Market? - Reprise
Editor:-
September 21, 2009 - 2 years ago StorageSearch.com
published an article -
How Solid is
Hard Disk's Future? - in which I looked at - what impact would the fast
growing solid state disk
market have on the overall
hard disk market?
Readers
had asked - "Is SSDs' gain really HDDs' loss?" - My analysis
concluded - "In some segments yes. But it's not a zero sum game."
This
theme is revisited in a new article published today by - Coughlin Associates
-
Flash
& HDD - Symbiosis, or Survival of the Fittest? (pdf).
The new
white paper, written by esteemed
storage analysts -
Tom Coughlin, Jim Handy
and Roger
F. Hoyt shows how many hard disk drives are sold because of digital
storage required to support flash
memory consumer electronics applications such as digital cameras,
camcorders, and music and video players. The paper makes the case that there
is more symbiosis than competition between hard disk drives and flash memory for
consumer electronics applications.
...read
the article (pdf)
Sonnet Launches Camera to Hard Drive Transfer Module
Editor:-
September 10, 2009 - Sonnet
Technologies today announced the
Qio
professional universal media reader/writer.
It's a convenient
high speed alternative to stand-alone card readers,
SATA controllers and
various adapters, combining their functionality in a compact rugged case, and
fulfilling the data handling needs of videographers with multiple cameras using
different memory card formats.
We talked to many customers who had combinations of Sony, Panasonic
and Red cameras who wanted some way to transfer the data from any of them at
full speed to hard drives,
needed drive-to-drive copy capability, and desired a compact, portable, rugged,
and battery-operable package," said Robert Farnsworth, CEO of Sonnet
Technologies. "The Qio does this and more!." Removable Storage
Intel Promises 3-bits-per-cell MLC Flash for Christmas
Editor:-
August 11, 2009 - Intel
and Micron Technology
today
announced
the development of a new 3-bit-per-cell MLC NAND technology, leveraging their
34nm geometry process.
The new 32Gb chips, expected to ship in
the 4th quarter, will typically be used in consumer storage devices such as
flash cards and
USB drives, where high
density and cost-efficiency are paramount.
Analyst
comments:- from Jim Handy,
Objective
Analysis - "The chip is not for all markets. Just as SLC NAND was
once thought to be poorly suited to SSDs, then
poorly suited to
enterprise SSDs, this chip, with a very low
endurance
level, is currently being promoted by the companies as a device well suited to
USB flash drives and flash cards for cameras and cell phones, but the companies
explained that they need more experience in production volumes before they will
be confident to position it as a chip suitable for the high-write environment of
the SSD."
Report Senses New Ways to Tap MLC
Editor:- July 24,
2009 - Forward
Insights has published a market report -
Key NAND Flash Memory
Design IP (price is $9,999).
Technical innovations in NAND flash
memory design are key enablers of
MLC flash memories,
especially 3 and 4 bit-per-cell technologies.
The report identifies
important intellectual property related to sensing architectures, source voltage
noise compensation, programming algorithms, disturbs reduction, temperature
compensation, high voltage switch, coding schemes and error correction codes
from Hynix, Micron, Samsung, SanDisk, STMicroelectronics and Toshiba.
The author, Luca
Crippa is an MLC flash memory designer with more than 10 years of experience
and is the author/co-author of 20 U.S. patents. SSD analysts ,
SSD IP,
XLC Disk (spoof)
Looking for Cheaper Flash?
Editor:- July 17, 2009 - "Future
NAND price reductions will be much less than what we have experienced" -
according the analysis in a new
article
by Lane Mason, Memory Market Analyst at Denali Software.
Lane
Mason analyzes the market assumptions, and historic cost base for SLC and MLC
flash (including x4) for various geometries and suppliers - and discusses the
likely cost per GB upto 2103. ...read
the article , Analysts
- SSD market
Most Secure USB Memory Stick
Editor:- July 13, 2009 -
IronKey today
announced the launch of its S200 USB flash drive for government and enterprise
customers.
IronKey's CEO David
Jevans said: "The IronKey S200 is the first and only
USB flash drive to achieve
the demanding FIPS 140-2, Level 3 security validation from NIST, giving even
more proof that IronKey is the world's most
secure flash drive. We
are also releasing a suite of new enterprise remote management capabilities,
available over the Internet from the IronKey managed service, or from our
enterprise server software that companies can install and operate themselves."
Phase Change Memory Designers Promised 2nd Source
Editor:-
June 23, 2009 - Numonyx
announced a
technology
agreement with Samsung
Electronics to develop common specifications for
Phase
Change Memory (PCM) products.
Both companies expecting to have
compliant devices ("pin for pin" comatible) available next year.
Editor's comments:- some large oems prefer to have alternate
sources before designing in new chips. It was
IBM's
insistence than Intel allow an official 2nd source for its x86 processors -
as part of the original Wintel PC design - which sowed the seeds for decades of
legal acrimony with AMD. (Intel and AMD didn't like each other much before that
anyway.)
Crocus Ports MRAM to Tower Fab
Editor:- June 18,
2009 -
Tower Semiconductor,
announced
it has taken an equity position (value approx $1.25 million) in Crocus Technologies,
and announced it is porting Crocus's
MRAM
to its 200mm wafer fab.
Editor's comments:- Crocus's
whitepaper -
the
Emergence of Practical MRAM (pdf) - gives the best explanation I've seen of
why, despite so many companies entering the MRAM market, so few useful products
have actually come out. It describes flaws in the intrinsic technology which
lead to data corruption (similar in concept to read-disturb errors in flash -
although completely different physically). It's necessary to fix these problems
to enable
reliable data storage.
The paper describes the proposed solution and also compares MRAM's
data density to other semiconductor memory technologies, including SRAM,
DRAM and
flash.
AGIGA Tech Samples High Density Non Volatile RAM Chips
Editor:-
May 26, 2009 - AGIGA
Tech started
sampling its new AGIGARAM
non-volatile system ( technology which delivers densities between 4 megabytes
(32 megabits) and 2 gigabytes (16 gigabits) and peak transfer rates equivalent
to DRAMs.
"Today's memory technologies all have a problem. DRAM is
volatile, flash is slow, SRAM with batteries is unreliable, and alternative
technologies are too costly to use in large densities," said Jim Handy,
Director of Objective
Analysis. "Products like AgigA Tech's that combine the best attributes
of DRAM and
NAND are likely to meet
with broad acceptance."
|
|
| PhotoFast
Announces Faster 1.8" Notebook SSDs |
| Editor:- May 27, 2009 - PhotoFast launched
its G-Monster 1.8"
SATA SSD with
internal 64MB DRAM cache
and upto 128GB capacity. |
 |
| It supports R/W speeds upto
230MB/s and 160MB/s respectively. The company says - what's important in this
type of notebook product is not just sequential R/W throughput for large blocks
- but also write performance for small random blocks. It claims its 12MB/s (for
4KB blocks) is best in class. | |
|
Unity Semiconductor Unveils
Flash's Successor
Editor:- May 19, 2009 - Unity Semiconductor
exited stealth mode and stated its aim to have the lowest manufacturing
cost per bit in the non volatile memory industry with a new breakthrough
technology called
CMOx.
The
company said it will ship 64Gb devices in volume in 2011. Unity Semiconductor
says it will develop and produce NAND flash successor technologies and
products that, in time, will extend into high ]performance embedded and
enterprise applications.
"It's a Technology for Terabits that
will challenge high volume rotating magnetic media" said Unity
Semiconductor Chairman, President & CEO Darrell Rinerson a former executive
at Micron Technology
and at AMD.
The
company, also announced today it has closed a Series C funding round for $22
million. This brings to nearly $75M the total funding to date in Unity
Semiconductor.
Article Peers into Nanocrystal NAND
Editor:- May
18, 2009 - a good article published on Semiconductor International called
- Peering
into Nanocrystal NAND - looks at factors affecting the potetial for future
shrinks in flash memory.
The author David Lammers
tackles an issue which I know has been worrying many flash SSD designers. He
starts with this sobering observation... "As the polysilicon floating
gate becomes smaller, fewer electrons are used to store a single bit. Any
rupture in the floating gate allows the electrons to leak away, presenting
reliability
challenges." ...read
the article
Ramtron's F-RAM Casualty of Auto Market Crash
Editor:-
May 7, 2009 - Ramtron
said its revenue
declined
26% in the 1st quarter of 2009 compared to the year ago period.
A
sharp decline in orders from the automotive market was cited as a principal
cause.
Ramtron also announced an update on a legal suit related to
in-field failures of one of its F-RAM memory products in an unspecified
application. (In July 2008 Ramtron confirmed that specific batches of product
had failed due to manufacturing
process
defects in one of its partners fabs.)
Ramtron also announced
today that, over the next 2 years, it will transition the manufacturing of
products that are currently being built at Fujitsu's chip foundry located in
Iwate, Japan to its foundry at Texas Instruments in Dallas, Texas and to its
newest foundry at IBM Corp in Essex Junction, Vermont.
Samsung Pays Spansion $70 million
Editor:- April 7,
2009 - Samsung
Electronics will pay Spansion $70 million
as part of a flash memory
patent settlement
announced
today.
The companies have also exchanged rights in their patent
portfolios in the form of licenses and covenants subject to a confidential
settlement agreement.
How 3D Memory Stacks Up - New Market Report
Editor:-
April 1, 2009 - Forward Insights
has released a new 70+ page report (price $5,499) called -
How 3D Memory Stacks
Up.
3D memory technologies offer the promise of continued increases
in storage capacities and lower cost per bit necessary to enable emerging
applications such as solid
state drives.
Among the candidates: stacked NAND technologies employing charge
trapping technology, vertical memory cells etched in a pillar and stackable
cross-point memory arrays. This report explores the feasibility of each of these
alternatives as a candidate to replace NAND
flash memories within the
next 4 years.
Aleratec Launches High Volume USB Flash Duplicators
Chatsworth, CA
- March 10, 2009 - Aleratec Inc. announces 2 new USB flash
duplicators.
Both the 27 way model (ESP $3,799) and 118 way model
(ESP $15,749) can copy up to 33MB/s. Aleratec's President and CEO, Perry
Solomon says - "The performance of the duplicators is not degraded when
simultaneously copying large numbers flash drives, a common shortcoming in most
USB flash drive
duplicators." ...Aleratec
profile, Disk
Duplicators
RRAM Steps Closer to Commercial Fabs
Editor:- March
10, 2009 - 4DS
announced
additional funding
as part of a multi-million dollar equity investment to port its
RRAM
technology to existing semiconductor fabs.
"PPP's investment
during a very tepid investment climate is testimony to the strength of our
technology and strategy," said Kurt Pfluger, CEO of 4DS, Inc. "We have
demonstrated the leaps in performance, flexibility and cost from our proprietary
process that will help enable a variety of compelling future memory
applications. With this additional investment from PPP, we are better positioned
to bring this technology to market."
Spansion Files for Bankruptcy
SUNNYVALE,
Calif. - March 1, 2009 - Spansion Inc. the world's largest pure-play
provider of flash memory solutions, today filed a voluntary petition for
reorganization under chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code.
The
company believes that its current and anticipated cash resources will be
sufficient to pay its expenses and maintain its business operations while it
explores and implements options to address its long-term cash needs. Spansion
emphasized that it intends to maintain customer service throughout the
reorganization.
...Spansion profile
Analyst comments:-
Jim Handy at Objective
Analysis explores
what
is likely to happen next? (pdf)
Hyperstone Launches CF SSD Controller
Konstanz,
Germany - February 19, 2009 - Hyperstone launched a controller
chip for oems designing industrial grade CF compatible SSDs.
The
F4 provides safe power-fail handling, error detection and correction and
static wear leveling. Data transfer rate to the attached
flash memory array (16
chips) is upto 80MB/s. Sustained R/W via the CF interface is upto 50MB/s and
40MB/s respectively. Alternatively oems can add a
SATA bridge, or
RAID controller for
other markets. ...Hyperstone
profile
SanDisk and Toshiba Confirm Flash Fab Assets Swap
MILPITAS,
CA - January 29, 2009 - SanDisk announced today that it has signed a
definitive agreement with Toshiba to restructure their flash
manufacturing joint ventures operating at the 300-mm Fab 3 and Fab 4.
As
part of the agreement, more than 20% of the joint ventures'capacity will be
transferred to Toshiba. The restructuring will result in the transfer of
equipment lease obligations from SanDisk to Toshiba and a cash payment to
SanDisk for the transfer of certain equipment currently owned by the joint
ventures. The total value to SanDisk is approximately 80 billion yen, or
approximately $890 million based on current exchange rates. The lease transfers
and cash payment are expected to be completed by the end of the first calendar
quarter of 2009. ...SanDisk
profile, ...Toshiba
profile, merged &
gone away storage companies
Editor's comments:- this simply
confirms earlier public announcements made by both companies
last October.
pureSilicon Unveils Terabyte 2.5" SSD
Editor:-
January 8, 2009 - according to a news report on
Marketwire
- pureSilicon is
sampling the highest density
2.5" SSD - with
1TB capacity in a 9.5mm high form factor.
Sustained read / write
performance is said to be 240MB/s and 215MB/s respectively. The
SATA SSD has latency
under 100 µsec and is rated at 50,000 read IOPS, and 10,000 write IOPS.
The
company emerged from stealth mode in October 2008 as a
military storage oem -
but the new products could find a much bigger market in commercial servers. I
asked if compression was involved in achieving the capacity - but was told - no.
Internally it's got 128 pieces of 64Gb MLC NAND. | |
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Can You Trust Your Flash
SSD's Specs & Benchmarks? |
No - sadly you
can't! There are many intrinsic technical reasons why you can't believe
most published benchmarks for flash SSDs (whether done by magazines or
vendors) and why even the tests you carefully do yourself don't give
reliable results which correlate with how the SSD will perform in real-life
applications.
We warned you of it this problem here on
StorageSearch.com last year - and now other publications and vendors are
starting to take it seriously too. ...read the article | |
| . |
|
|
| . |
SSDs Pass HDDs
in Storage Density?
2009 may well be remembered as the year
that flash SSDs surpassed
HDDs in storage capacity in the same form factor.
I'm not talking about
itsy bitsy
1 inch and smaller drives
here. I'm talking about the hard core
2.5" form factor.
That's
the size which once seemed to offer the
best hopes
for hard disk makers staying in business - in applications like disk to
disk backup, entertainment
bulk storage etc.
In January 2009 - pureSilicon started
sampling a
2.5" MLC SSD -
with 1TB capacity in a 9.5mm high form factor.
A few weeks later
Western Digital
temporarily restored the parity in storage density when it announced a
2TB
3.5" hard drive. Since you can put 2x 2.5" drives into a single
3.5" enclosure - you
can think of them as being equivalent. That is until either the next
amplification in MLC (if it ever
works) or the next shrink in flash memory (maybe
later than sooner).
Price of the 2.5" terabyte SSD wasn't
mentioned. I expect it will cost a lot. But nowhere near as much as the 1st
terabyte SSDs cost - when they appeared in
2002 - at
a cool $2 million.
So you may well ask - when will SSDs cost less
than HDDs for the same capacity?
In some high-performance grades (15K
RPM server drives) - I expect to see that happen this year - in smaller
capacities like 100GB. Looking Ahead to the
2009 SSD Market | |
| . |
the Fastest Solid State
Disks
Speed isn't everything, and it comes at a price. |
But if
you do need the6speediest
SSD then wading through the web sites of over 100 current
SSD oems to find a suitable
candidate slows you down.
And the SSD search problem will get even
worse. |
 | |
| I've
done the research for you to save you time. And this page is updated daily from
storage news and direct
inputs from oems. ...read
the article, | |
| . |
| SSD Myths and
Legends - "write endurance" |
| Does
the fatal gene of "write endurance" built into
flash
solid state
disks prevent their deployment in intensive server acceleration
applications - such as RAID
systems? |
It
was certainly true as little as a few years ago.
What's the risk with
today's devices?
This article looks at the current generation of
products and calculates how much (or how little) you should be worried. |
| |
| RAM based SSDs have been
used alongside RAID for years - but
flash SSDs are
physically smaller and have bigger capacity (upto 412G in 2.5", 512G in
3.5") and are lower cost than RAM-SSDs and could actually be configured
in standard RAID boxes. F-SSDs aren't as fast as RAM based products but a single
flash SSD can deliver 20,000 IOPs - which when scaled up in an array - starts to
look interesting.
...read the
article,
storage reliability
solid state disks | |
| . |
 |
|
SSD Bookmarks
suggested
by - Kevin T Crow, Strategy Specialist, NAND Solutions Group, Intel |
Here's an article written by or
about Intel
Enterprise-wide
Deployment of Notebook PCs with Solid-State Drives
Kevin says he
chose this article because "It will give the reader an overview of the
benefits experienced by the enterprise after deploying notebooks with solid
state drives."
The article is a case study about the productivity benefits of using
SSD based notebooks instead of hard drive notebooks inside an enterprise
(Intel). Following an internal evaluation Intel found the benefits so "compelling"
that it decided to deploy up to 10,000 SSD notebooks to its own employees.
Other SSD article suggestions...
The SSD
Relapse: Understanding and Choosing the Best SSD - published by
AnandTech
Kevin says "This
is the latest in a long series of
reviews
that compare solid state drives and discusses the technology behind them.
Overall the series does a very good job educating the reader on what they need
to know when making a solid state drive purchase decision."
Editor:-
thanks Kevin for sharing your SSD links.
see also:-
Intel
- editor mentions on STORAGEsearch.com | | |
| . |
Squeak!
- Animal Brands and Metaphors in the Storage Market
Animal
marketing metaphors are popular in service industries, but you'd be surprised
how many companies have used animals in their marketing of data storage
products and services.
As the storage market gets bigger - more
companies will turn to animal brands to help differentiate their otherwise bland
products and lend them artificial (or deserving) characters and virtues.
The idea behind this type of marketing is to suggest positive connotations so
it's unlikely that anyone will choose to associate their products with gremlins.
But you may be surprised by the population of the storage ark.
This
reference articles lists all known companies who have furry marketing brands,
and also includes some which are slimy, scaly and scary too. ...read the article,
Mice in storage |
| | |
