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Foremay, Inc. was
established in 2002 and is headquartered in the Silicon Valley, California, USA.
Foremay's main business is to design and manufacture
high
reliability and
high
performance Solid State Drives (SSDs) for
mission critical computing, industrial computing, enterprise computing and high
end
personal
computing. |
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Foremay's vision is to bring high ruggedness and
high performance SSDs for
high reliability
systems with "Green
Initiatives" in mind.
see also:-
Foremay
- editor mentions on StorageSearch.com |
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Who's who in SSD? -
Foremay
by
Zsolt Kerekes,
editor - January 2013
A few years ago Foremay was
frequently listed in StorageSearch.com's
Top 10 SSD Companies
list (the last time was in
2011) and from
time to time in the
fastest SSDs list.
The company offers products which are mainly aimed at embedded
applications in these product categories:-
industrial SSDs,
SATA SSDs,
PCIe SSDs,
2.5" SSDs,
military SSDs.
The
company recently launched a 2TB 2.5" SATA SSD - which is aimed at
stretching the life of embedded designs originally conceived around
hard disk standards.
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In June 2009 -
Foremay announced one
of the fastest
2.5" SLC flash
SSDs in the market. The SATA compatible
SC199 Cheetah
V-Series has sustained R/W speeds of 260MB/s and /250MB/s respectively and
42,000 random IOPS. Capacity options range from 32GB to 256GB.
That
makes the 3rd Cheetah in my
Animal Brands in
the Storage Market Directory. Click on the link to see the full storage
zoo.
In July 2009 -
Foremay announced a new
1.8" SLC flash SSD.
The SATA compatible
SC 199 Cheetah
has sustained R/W speeds of 250MB/s and 220MB/s respectively. R/W IOPS are
6,000 and 5,200 respectively. Capacity options range from 16GB to 64GB.
Endurance
for the 16GB device is rated at 87 years assuming 50GB sequential writes per
day.
In September 2009 -
Foremay announced the
SC199 Hi-Rel Series SLC flash SSDs in 1.8", 2.5" and 3.5" form
factors which meet military standards MIL-STD-810G and MIL-STD-833G.
Operational temperature options include -40°C to approx 100°C.
In
October 2009 - Foremay launched its
EC188 Jaguar
Series flash SSDs optimized for the Mac market. Form factors include
1.8",
2.5" and
3.5", interface
types include SATA, micro SATA, SATA LIF, IDE and IDE ZIF/LIF. Capacties range
from 64GB to 1TB and R/W speeds are upto 260/230MB/s.
Also in October
2009 - Foremay
entered the PCIe SSD
market with its
EC188
Dragon series - which is now sampling.
Supporting both x8 and x16
slots - R/W performance is upto 1.5 GB/s and 1.3 GB/s respectively. Both MLC and
SLC models are available. Capacities range from 128GB to 4TB. Sequential R/W
IOPS is up to 90,000/80,000. Random R/W IOPS is up to 27,000/12,000.
Features
include power outage protection, dual PCIe configuration through a built-in
PCIe RAID controller, and active garbage collection. OS support includes
Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris, Linux, and UNIX. ...Later:- in February
2011 - one of my readers who wanted to evaluate Foremay's PCIe SSD cards for
Solaris apps was told that it wan't actually available - but could be expedited
for a considerable development fee. Naughty Foremay! Looks like they
preannounced a feature that doesn't yet exist!
In November 2009
-
Foremay announced it is
shipping the world's
fastest 2.5" SATA flash SSDs.
The
SC199 Cheetah Y-Series has R/W speeds up to 290/280 MB/s in
2.5" and
3.5" SATA form
factors - which approaches the theoretical speed limit of the SATA-II protocol.
It also delivers impressive R/W IOPS of up to 50,000/45,000 respectively.
Also in November 2009 -
Foremay announced
that secure erase and fast
purge options are now available for most models in its
SC199
SSD product family.
In February 2010 -
Foremay started
sampling
its EC188 D-series 2nd generation
fast
PCIe SSDs with
capacity upto 4TB (MLC)
and 1TB (SLC). The new SSDs deliver sequential speeds up to 1.6 GB/s for
reading and 1.5 GB/s for writing, and R/W IOPS up to 200K/180K.
Foremay's new PCIe SSDs aim at the same kind of customers who currently buy
from
Fusion-io and
Texas Memory Systems
both of whom have been shipping this type of product for over a year
already. Customer qualification by OS and application type is a prerequisite
to sales in this part of the market. Foremay will have to be aggressive
on price to get volume customers interested enough to test its products.
In
April 2010 - Foremay
started sampling SAS SSDs
in its
EC188
product line. The new models (available in
2.5" or
3.5" form factors,
and available in commercial and industrial temperature grades) have R/W speeds
of 250MB/s and 200MB/s respectively, random read/write
IOPS up to
30,000/25,000 and upto 400GB capacity. That brings the number of
SAS SSD companies
listed on StorageSearch.com to 13.
In
July 2010 - Foremay
announced it is shipping 2TB
3.5" and 1TB
2.5" SATA flash
SSDs in its EC188 M-series model V product range. R/W speeds are up to
200MB/s. ECC is 24-bit. The SSDs are bootable and support all major
operating systems.
In August 2010 -
Foremay's CTO, Jack
Winters presented a paper -
Secure Erase
Options for SSDs (pdf) - at the recent
Flash Memory Summit.
The paper describes the need for
SSD data purge and
the 3 techniques which the company supports in its Avalanche Secure Erase
Suite.
In September 2010 -
Foremay announced it is
shipping SATA 3 versions of its
EC188
M-series flash SSDs (2.5" and 3.5" SSDs) - with R/W speeds upto
450MB/s and 350MB/s respectively.
In November 2010 -
Foremay
announced
shipment of the fastest 1.8"
micro SATA slim flash SSDs - with 280MB/s R/W and random
IOPS as
follows:- up to 30,000 read and 15,000 write. The 5mm high SSDs have
capacity up to 400GB and are available in industrial temperature versions.
In
February 2011 - I became aware from a reader complaint that information
on Foremay's website was misleading with respect to Solaris driver availability
for its PCIe SSDs - with key documents claiming in was available - when in fact
it wasn't available on all models. Foremay acknowledge there was a problem with
their documentation which described the OS support of a product family - which
did not extend to a newer model with an almost identical model number. In
response to a request by StorageSearch.com - the company amended key documents
on its web site to make OS compatibility clearer.
In March 2011
- StorageSearch.com
published a new update in the
SSD Bookmarks series
- with
links
suggested by Jack H Winters,
CTO, Foremay.
Foremay announced it is
shipping 32GB PATA
versions of its
OC177
SSD Disk on Chip which measures 22 x 22 x 1.8 mm and has R/W speeds of 70
and 40MB/s respectively.
In August 2011 -
Foremay announced
that it has shipped SSDs from its
SC199
Hi-Rel range for deployment in NASA's
next generation space program.
In January 2013 -
Foremay shipped 2TB
industrial 2.5"
SATA SSDs with standard 9.5mm thickness.
SSD news
Can you
trust SSD market data?
Adaptive R/W and
DSP in flash SSD IP
the Silo classification for
all enterprise SSDs
Symmetries and
consequences in SSD design
Understanding what shapes
flash SSD performance
Efficiency - making the
same SSD - with less chips |
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7 articles related to where
Foremay is in the SSD market:-
1.8" SSDs
2.5" SSDs
SAS SSDs
PCIe SSDs
military SSDs
industrial SSDs
fast purge / secure erase
SSDs |
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| Foremay ships 2TB 2.5"
SSDs for industrial market |
Editor:- January 15, 2013 - Foremay today
announced
immediate availability of 2TB
industrial
2.5"
SATA SSDs with
standard 9.5mm thickness.
Editor's comments:- In its press
release for this product Foremay claims to be the first company to do this. But
this is one of those situations where I think being "first" tells us
more about market conditions (where things stand in the
HDD replacement
part of the SSD market) than about the technological supremacy - or
otherwise - of any particular SSD oem.
It's been technically feasible
to make 2TB 2.5" SATA SSDs for the past 2 years. The only reason you
haven't seen them flooding into the market is that such products would have been
unattractive before to both SSD oems and to SSD buyers.
For the SSD oem
- the same bunch of memory chips used to make a 2TB 2.5" SATA drive - have
been much more profitably deployed in faster SSD modules such as
PCIe SSDs or
SAS SSDs.
Meanwhile
for SSD buyers and specifiers - 2TB 2.5" SSDs would have been very
expensive -
compared to the alternatives - while delivering no performance benefits (due to
the slowness of the SATA interface) which means that 2x 1TB SATA drives are
faster in a storage system then 1x 2TB drive.
In today's market,
however, the cost differences between flash SSDs and hard drives have shrunk to
the extent that for industrial equipment designers who look at the cost of
reliability in a
7 year industrial product operating life timeframe - the alternative of using
1 factory fitted SSD compared to the probability of using 2-3 HDDs in the same
slot (taking into account the MTBF distribution over the system population)
makes high capacity SATA SSDs attractive.
This class of SSDs will
also extend the market life of equipment designs which originally used
HDD interface standards as a way of virtualizing and protecting against
generational changes in raw flash
memory - even if they never used hard drives. The extra storage capacity
enables equipment designers to integrate more features and software. | | |
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| Fast Purge flash SSDs
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| The need for fast and
secure data erase - in which vital parts of a flash SSD or its data are
destroyed in seconds - has always been a requirement in military projects.
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Although many industrial
SSD vendors offer products with extended "rugged" operating
environment capabilities - and even
notebooks SSDs come
with encryption - it's the availability of fast data purge which
differentiates "truly secure" SSDs which can be deployed in
sensitive applications.
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