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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. 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
August 2011 -
Foremay has been
frequently listed in StorageSearch.com's
Top 10 SSD Companies
list and from time to time in the
fastest SSDs list.
Foremay
has 80+ theoretical competitors in the
2.5" SSD market.
And if the SATA SSD
market wasn't already difficult enough the company has recently entered the
SAS SSD market too -
where, however, it should have no difficulty in beating price levels set by
STEC.
Will
SAS storage oems
rush to qualify these new products from a supplier which hasn't been in the SSD
market very long? - We'll have to wait and see.
In the
PCIe SSD market
Foremay's main competitors are:-
Fusion-io,
InnoDisk,
LSI,
OCZ,
PhotoFast,
Texas Memory Systems
and Virident Systems.
When it comes to choosing enterprise SSDs users need to look at a lot
more issues than price, performance and OS compatibility. Issues like technology
roadmaps are important. Today's product may fit your needs - but how long will
you have to wait before new models are usable? This is particularly important
if the OS you use isn't at the top of the oem's list when new models are being
sampled. Another issue for all SSDs - is internal differences in architecture
which lead to different
power down
characteristics. That may mean a PCIe SSD works OK if there's only one in
the rack - but may need to be requalified if you have 2, 3 or 4. |
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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. |
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| "There was a time
- prior to 2005 - when if a flash SSD company announced that its drives had been
qualified for use in a space mission by NASA - that would have opened the doors
to most of the flash SSD market... but when Foremay did one of these
NASA type announcements recently... " |
| ...Editor:- from the
new edition of
the Top SSD Companies. | | |
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| Fast Purge flash SSDs
when "Rugged SSDs"
won't do |
| 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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| Can you believe the
word "reliability" in a 2.5" SSD ad? |
Editor:-
Reliability is an
important factor in many applications which use
SSDs.... but can you trust
an SSD brand just because it claims to be reliable?
As we've seen in
recent years - in the rush for the
SSD market bubble -
many design teams which previously had little or no experience of SSDs were
tasked with designing such products - and the result has been successive waves
of flaky SSDs and
SSDs whose specifications
couldn't be relied on to remain stable and in many products quickly
degraded in customer sites. |
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As part of an education
series for SSD product marketers - this case study describes how one company -
which didn't have the conventional background to start off with - managed to
equate their brand of SSD with reliability in the minds of designers in the
embedded systems market. ...read the article | | | |
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| SSD Pricing -
where does all the money go? |
SSDs are among the most
expensive computer hardware products you will ever buy.
Understanding
the factors which determine SSD costs is often a confusing and irritating
process... |
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...not made any easier when
market prices for identical capacity SSDs can vary more than 100x to 1!
Why is that? ...read
the article | | | |
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| SSD revenue
will double in 2011 .......... |
Editor:- March 17, 2011 - iSuppli today
announced it expects
SSD
revenue in 2011 to hit $4.4 billion - up 91% from $2.3 billion in
2010.
By
2014, iSuppli expects SSD revenue to reach $7 billion.
The industry's
hottest segment in 2011 will be SSDs for consumer usage, iSuppli predicts, as
shipments of SSD-outfitted high-end
notebooks
skyrocket. SSD's other growth segment this year lies in the
enterprise,
which increasingly employs flash storage to overcome performance bottlenecks.
SSD shipments this year will be on an upswing, projected to reach
approximately 15 million units compared to 6.9 million in
2010. Yet
SSD shipments still remain miniscule compared to those for
hard disk drives, which
will total roughly 161 million units in the 1st quarter of 2011 alone. At the
same time, the hard disk drive market is consolidating and seeing much slower
growth.
Editor's comments:- the SSD market size numbers and growth
rates tally with other estimates published in recent months.
Personally
- in the short term I'm more bullish on the enterprise SSD market (which
delivers immediate quantifiable value) than I am on consumer SSDs (which have
often suffered from
poor oem
integration and delivered little more benefit than fashion
accessories). |
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