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"3DXPoint is a honey trap for new software so you can understand Intel's infatuation with the technology whatever shortcomings the raw memory may have compared to other options in the market today." That's one angle of my new blog on StorageSearch.com - the importance of being earnest about 3DXPoint - and other SSD memoryfication heresies (June 6, 2018) - which - among other things - reappraises the flash DIMM SCM market in the light of what was expected to happen at the outbreak of DIMM wars in 2015 and what really did happen (despite the stimulus of memory shortages - which should have made any alternatives to DRAM seem even more attractive). An important aspect of future market directions is the reality check that memory touches more software than storage. ...read the article ..... Intel Intel, the world leader in silicon innovation, develops technologies, products and initiatives to continually advance how people work and live. Additional information about Intel is available at www.intel.com/pressroom. .... See also:- Intel - editor mentions on StorageSearch.com and Intel's SSD page after AFAs - what's next? 3D nand fab yield - the nth layer tax? 2017 - added new notes to the music of memory tiering miscellaneous consequences of the 2017 memory shortages the ups and downs of capacitor hold up in 2.5" military flash SSDs controllernomics and user risk reward with big memory "flash as RAM" .. .. The first time I suggested to a processor design team that they should look at adding support for solid state storage in their new CPUs instead of just adding more cores was about 2000. I got the response at that time - what's an SSD? And nothing more came of the matter. optimizing CPUs for use with SSDs in the Post Modernist Era .. .. who's who in SSD? - Intel by Zsolt Kerekes, editor - StorageSearch.com, January 2016 Intel entered the SSD market in 2007 and made its first appearance in the Top SSD Companies list in 2008 Q4 (at which time the company achieved its highest ever rank of #5). Later Intel matched this #5 top rank in 2017 Q4. Throughout the period from 2007 to 2014 Intel's main roles in the SSD market were as a distributor, aggregator, me-too follower and customer of SSD technologies and roadmaps which had been created and developed by other companies. Although those activities had grown Intel to a billion dollar scale SSD business by 2015 it was a business leveraged on Intel's past brand strength in other technologies - rather than technological leadership in SSDs. Intel's original technological contributions to the adoption of SSDs and SSD architecture in SSD market history upto 2015 can be summed as being somewhere between zero to negligible. But there were signs in the 2nd half of 2015 that Intel's disconnect from the gene-pool of SSD roadmap inventiveness might change. Intel was ranked #11 ( up 5 places) in the new Q3 2015 edition of the Top SSD Companies List which is researched and published by StorageSearch.com. This upward revision of Intel's importance by the SSD market was due to news that Intel would enter the DIMM wars markets (targeting both memory channel SSD and SCM) with a non volatile memory technology called 3D XPoint / Optane developed in partnership with Micron. The concept of retiring and retiering enterprise DRAM was one of the big SSD in 2015 which gained traction as the number of vendors announcing such products approached double digits. This new product segment will become a multi billion dollar market. .. "SSDs are changing a market (data processing) which was designed without any original conception of SSDs being there in the first place." the enterprise SSD story why's the plot so complicated? (June 17, 2015) Intel and Altera - an SSD architecture perspective? by Zsolt Kerekes - editor - StorageSearch.com - July 20, 2015 I didn't write about Intel's agreement to acquire Altera at the time of the announcement in June 2015 - because I don't think it will change any of the fundamental technology directions in the SSD market. But I did discuss it with some readers who asked me about related issues. Here are some extracts from what I said in various emails. The Altera acquisition makes perfect business sense - because Intel had lost out on many big markets (such as mobile phones etc) due to its unwillingness to design custom solutions for specific systems. Intel's inability to make that kind of business work (where the customer leads the architecture) was demonstrated back in the late 1980s with their ASIC business which was based on gate array technology which they obtained from IBM in return for rights for IBM to design custom X86 processors. Unfortunately the IBM ASIC technology was unwieldy and less well supported by low cost EDA tools than many of the competitive offerings from pure play gate array and standard cell companies. So the ASIC technology was unattractive outside a small core customer base - and soon fizzled out. - But IBM got to keep the more valuable rights to the X86. And like other market lessons where Intel experimented but got burned (such as the digital watch and DRAM) that lesson remained imprinted in future Intel management culture - that there are some markets which Intel should avoid participtaing in with market specific silicon products:- those which have the potential to be commodities (like memory) and those which require high degrees of customization and custom architecture for one specific product or customer and where Intel's architecture and legacy software ecosystems are not the central themes of the product. Altera provides a way of market customization via a standard product. And FPGAs from Altera and other companies are widely used within enterprise SSD systems and also within low to medium volume embedded SSD drives too. Therefore this acquisition - which gives Intel a market leading reprogrammable controller platform - will enable marketers and technologists in Intel to stick to the comfortable concept of predictable semiconductor geometry based roadmaps - while also having an engagement within the SSD market and visibility of trends which goes much wider than their previous product lines enabled. . who's who in SSD? - Intel by Zsolt Kerekes, editor - StorageSearch.com, March 30, 2015 Despite having significant revenue* in the SSD market - Intel has never been a technology leader or architectural road map director of SSD related technologies. Instead the company has leveraged its market dominance in processors and marketing channels to become a significant distributor and oem of 3rd party SSD controller technologies and me-too standard SSDs which often strategically use flash memory from Intel's long term partner Micron. Intel was ranked #21 in the Q4 2014 edition of the Top SSD Companies List *In a a presentation (pdf) delivered to investors in November 2013 - Diane Bryant, Senior VP & GM Data Center Group, Intel said the company regards itself as the #1 supplier of SSDs to the datacenter - with "an SSD drive business worth around $1 billion." . . . Who's who in SSD? - Intel - an earlier SSD summary by Zsolt Kerekes, editor August 2013 Intel was ranked #20 in the top SSD companies (based on metrics in the 2nd quarter of 2013), and has never been listed in the fastest SSDs. Intel is 1 of more than 100 companies in the 2.5" SSD market, and 1 of more than 50 companies in the PCIe SSD market. Intel has used SSD controllers from a range of companies - including (in the past year) LSI. Intel SSDs in the modern era Intel entered the SSD market in 2007. The company's products since then have mainly appealed to the consumer and embedded markets. Intel was dumped by some enterprise SSD arrays makers who used its early generations of SSDs for reasons said to be related to design flaws and recalls which affected performance stability and reliability. Part of Intel's SSD learning curve involved designing some really bad SSDs - which demonstrated the company's lack of knowledge about the fundamental building blocks needed to design a reliable storage drive. In the summer of 2011 - after yet another SSD / firmware recall - this led me to comment - "If Intel's SSD design business was a horse - it would have been shot a long time ago and put out of its misery..." Intel's customers have painfully learned that there's a lot more to designing SSDs than soldering a bunch of memory chips to a controller and host interface. Intel's designers should have known that too. Despite those earlier problems, however, one of Intel's more recent enterprise SSD oem customers - Cisco - has publicly endorsed Intel as a valued SSD supplier. In the long term I expect Intel will buy an SSD company or continue leveraging 3rd party SSD controllers and IP. Intel vs Fusion-io? Some readers have asked me what I think about Intel's PCIe SSDs compared to those from Fusion-io? But although those types of artificial comparisons are often seen in magazine benchmarks and investment sites they aren't naturally head to head competitors for most serious users in my view. In some high transaction rate SSD environments Intel's SSDs have been reported by several readers to wear out more quickly than more expensive true enterprise SSDs. The results shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who reads the datasheets - but some end-users aren't savvy enough to recognize that there are different application silos within enterprise SSDs. Put the wrong type of SSD in the wrong place and instead of being the cheap option - it can become the expensive option when it inevitably fails in service. And last year (April 2012) Intel launched a PCIe SSDs which in my analysis looked like it could wear out in less than 6 months if used 24x7 at its full rated speed. Intel also has also done many SSD firmware recalls and had products which were reported to suffer from power supply corruption vulnerabilities. Is there a market for such products? Sure - it's the consumer market - and some parts of the enterprise market where the performance stress levels are not so demanding. There's no such thing as the perfect SSD which is a good competitive fit for all markets. And in that respect Intel is no different to any other SSD company. The only problem is that it's natural for users to expect more - given Intel's past successes in computing. My view is that Intel isn't good enough yet at leading edge mission critical SSDs. And although it keeps trying to get better at SSD, and will no doubt greatly improve its core SSD competencies – my guess is it won't be one of the top thought leaders in this phase of the market where change is happening so fast - and the market change drivers appear to mystify companies - like Intel - which don't have true native SSD DNA. You shouldn't be surprised by that. Intel has never been a customer responsive company. They're used to creating standards rather than adapting to them . That's why they failed in ASIC and phones. Does it matter that Intel, while being a world leading semiconductor company, doesn't have true grit - in the SSD sense? No and Yes. No - because the SSD market is big enough and diverse enough to soak up millions of Intel SSDs even if the company isn't the best at the sharp end of the enterprise server space. Yes - and why I'm sure that Intel will continue to engage in the SSD market is because:- it can't afford not to. SSD-CPU equivalence means that processors and SSD storage will inevitably become more tightly coupled on motherboards. And if a dividing line is made - then the processor is the commodity and the SSD is the application specific value add - where the dollars and the profit lie. And Intel's history shows it hates the idea of being a commodity chip supplier. . . Intel's SSD milestones in SSD market history Intel was a pioneer in SSD market history. But then took a 20 year sabbatical. In the early 1980s - Intel shipped an SSD based on magnetic bubble memory technology which emulated a 1Mb floppy drive. (I had one of the evaluation kits.) But this early foray into solid state storage didn't meet Intel's need for scalability either as a technology or as a business. So Intel spun off the magnetic division in 1987 to Memtech. Memtech ditched bubble memory but became a pioneer in the rugged and military flash SSD market (an example product was the 3.5" PATA compatible Wolverine). In August 2005 Memtech was acquired by STEC. Intel's troubled past with memory products - (many of which it had invented - but abandoned to Asian competitors) was probably a factor in delaying its decision to re-enter the SSD market till 2007 - which was 2 years after Samsung had publicly declared this to be a strategic market. Within a few years of this re-entry, however, Intel was shipping 2.5" SSDs with performance specs superficially better than the leading products previously available from Asian companies (Mtron and Memoright). Intel's troubled present with SSDs - In the rush to gate crash the frothing SSD market bubble, and lacking vital end-user storage industry experience - Intel has produced succeeding products (up to 4 SSD recalls, upgrade fixes or delayed shipments according to industry estimates) with undesirable halo effects or flaky operation - which have seriously dented its reputation among designers of enterprise class SSD arrays. In October 2008 - Intel started shipping the X-25E - a fast 2.5" 32GB SATA SLC flash SSD. Read latency is 75 microseconds and a 10 parallel channel architecture enables it to sustain R/W throughputs of 250 / 170 MB/s. Random IOPS performance is impressive with a 10 to 1 R/W ratio which is inline with the best designed enterprise flash SSDs. Using 4kB blocks - random R/W IOPS are 35,000 and 3,300 respectively. In his October 2008 blog, Linux creator Linus Torvalds wrote about his own experience with Intel's new SSD. Just as relevant are the many comments which followed about better (and worse) products. In December 2008 - Hitachi and Intel announced they were jointly designing a new range of high IOPS flash SSDs with Fibre Channel and SAS interfaces for the server market. The new products, which will be exclusively marketed by Hitachi GST - are expected to ship in Q1 2010. In January 2009 - Kingston Technology announced it will sell rebranded high speed SSDs supplied by Intel as Kingston's SSDNow E Series. In February 2009 - Solid Data Systems published a Test of Intel's X25 Flash SSD Performance (pdf). The white paper reveals the degradation in performance in Intel's headlining SSD, due to weak garbage collection. This is something which had been known about in the industry - but not in this level of detail (except under NDA). In April 2009 - a report on TGDaily.com said that Intel is EOLing its Z-P230 SSD module which was aimed at the netbook market. If you look at the 1.0" SSDs directory here on StorageSearch.com you'll see that 25 companies now make SSD chips, DOMs or modules designed to fit into very small footprints. In July 2009 - Intel announced a process shrink for its X25-M - SATA 2.5" MLC flash SSD. The new 34nm devices deliver upto 8,800 (4KB) write IOPS and up to 35,000 read IOPS. R/W speeds are 250MB/s and 70MB/s respectively. R/W latenciy is 65µS and 85µS. The 160GB model is priced at $440 (1,000 unit price point). In September 2009 - Pillar dumped Intel SSDs due to flaky operation and switched to STEC. Maybe they should have spent a bit more time qualifying the Intel product beforehand - or done a better job at it? Also in September 2009 - Kevin T Crow, Strategy Specialist, NAND Solutions Group, -Intel shared his SSD Bookmarks with readers of StorageSearch.com. In October 2009 - Intel joined the growing roster of SSD companies who have announced support for Trim functions. These benefit flash SSDs which don't have internal fast active garbage collection. The company recommends users install the firmware update and toolbox, and run the Trim function daily to ensure best performance. In February 2010 - Intel and Micron announced they are sampling the world's 1st 25nm NAND flash memory. This gives 8GB MLC (classic 2 bit) flash memory in a stackable TSOP. In July 2010 - the terrible tale of one enterprise customer hitting endurance limits with Intel's SSDs was mentioned in an interview with Fusion-io's CEO. In September 2010 - Intel's SSD Bookmarks on StorageSearch.com were updated with new links to help prospective enterprise SSD users. In November 2010 - Intel Capital led a $32 million funding round into Anobit (an SSD controller company). In March 2011 - Intel published version 1.0 of a new proprietary standard for designers of PCI SSDs in systems which use Intel processors - the NVM Express Optimized PCI Express SSD Interface. Intel launched a new 2.5" SSD aimed at legacy notebook designs which have 3Gbps SATA ports. The Intel SSD 320 (which includes 128 bit encryption) is available with MLC capacities from 40GB ($89 1k price) to 600GB ($1,069 1k). R/W speeds are 270MB/s and 220MB/s respectively. R/W IOPS are 39,500 and 23,000. In this new design , Intel has added redundancies that will help keep user data protected, even in the event of a power loss. In October 2011 - an article in VR-Zone discusses a "leaked" Intel SSD roadmap which indicates the company may enter the PCIe SSD market in 2012. It's hardly a revelation - because Intel is member of technical groups which are co-ordinating standards in this segment of the SSD market - and until standards for the Hybrid Memory Cube get established (which could take another 3 years) - the PCIe SSD market is the closest attachment that an SSD can make to an Intel server host processor bus. And it has the additional attraction of not needing 3rd party storage interface glue - unlike SATA, SAS, FC and IB - thereby giving more control to any chip company which does it right. Over 30 companies have already shipped PCIe SSDs in the past 3 years. This will be a multi-billion dollar market segment according to StorageSearch.com's long range enterprise SSD market model. In January 2012 - Intel announced an agreement to acquire the InfiniBand related product lines, IP and business assets of QLogic. In February 2012 - Intel announced it has used SandForce controllers for the first time in its new (and fastest) SATA 3 2.5" SSD - the Intel SSD 520 - which (with upto 80K R/W IOPS peak - 4KB) is aimed at gaming, CAD and graphics content creation markets. In April 2012 - Intel launched a new fast-enough PCIe MLC SSD - the 910 Series has upto 800GB capacity ($3,859) and 180K / 75K R/W IOPS (4K blocks). UBER is 1 sector per 1016 bits read. In July 2012 - Intel acquired NEVEX - (an SSD software company with products in the SSD caching market. In February 2013 - Intel announced imminent shipment of a Linux version of SSD caching software called Intel CAS (Cache Acceleration Software) - based on the IP from its acquisition of NEVEX in August 2012. In April 2013 - Intel - which was already using LSI's SandForce controllers in some SSDs - announced it will oem LSI's dual-core RAID-on-Chip flash caching technology. (LSI's caching technology can double the number of VDI sessions supported in the same sever and flash environment.) In May 2014 - Intel Capital was one of the leading investors in a $25 million series B investment in Maxta. In July 2015 - Intel began unveiling a new future memory technology co-developed with Micron - called 3DXpoint. . RAM used to be a component. Now RAM is whatever the software is happy to greet by that name. The economic impact of SSDcentric software and systems architecture is nearly as important to the RAM (which you think you're working with) as the raw nanometer layout of the memory cells. RAM in an SSD context .	..	This acquisition will give Intel greater visibility and flexible capability in the next wave of application specific memory and processor enhancers. Intel to acquire eASIC - SSD news in July 2018 .. Micron and Intel will pursue different flash futures in 2019 Editor:- January 8, 2018 - Micron and Intel today announced that they will work independently on future generations of 3D nand flash after having shipped the last jointly developed products in early 2019 .. Intel promises dual port SSDs Editor:- August 7, 2017 - Intel today announced some new upcoming data center oriented SSDs among which were:- dual port versions of some SSD models promised in Q3 2017 a new form factor for SSDs - the "ruler" form factor - which the company said "will come to market in the near future". .. .. many years ago in SSD history In March 2007 - Intel launched its first product for the SSD market. The Z-U130 - was an 8GB USB SSD aimed at embedded products and notebook motherboards. USB wasn't a flagship interface for SSDs even back then - so it was a bit of a yawn product from a company unsure even if it wanted to engage in the SSD market. As I predicted back in 2003 - it was inevitable that SSDs would change the processor and server markets and that once any single enterprise server maker offered SSD acceleration as a standard option - it was inevitable that all the rest would have to follow - as wothout SSDs - the servers would be left behind in performance and energy consumption. It was Fusion-io and their evangelistic marketing of PCIe SSDs in 2007 and 2008 which marked that transition. But the interplay between memory and processor architecture roles didn't stop there. A new twist spawned in the early SCM DIMM wars (2015) inspired by flash as RAM in DIMM sockets. However - the widening choice of competing non volatile memories in 2016/2017 - which provided usable memory between the latency and capacity shores previously limited by DRAM and flash enabled another stage of design optimizations for CPU designers - the addition of significant nvm inside the processor SoC and closely coupled and supported by software. For more about this see my article - optimizing CPUs for use with SSD. .. Intel is sampling 3DXpoint PCIe SSDs Editor:- March 19, 2017 - Intel today announced that it is sampling its long awaited first enterprise SSD which uses 3DXpoint (Optane) memory and which is aimed at the HHHL PCIe SSD market. The P4800X Series (pdf) has a PCIe 3.0 x 4 NVMe interface and provides upto 375GB capacity, 500K mixed IOPS (4KB), block level R/W latency 150/200S (queue depth 16), and endurance of 30 DWPD for 3 years (equivalent to 18 on a 5 year adjusted basis). The new drives are supported by caching / tiering software (Intel Memory Drive Technology) which collaborates with motherboard DRAM resources to transparently provide an emulated 3DX as RAM memory pool. This is similar in concept to earlier software products in the market from various vendors which have supported flash as RAM. A rounded perspective can be seen in a new blog Intel Announces Optane SSDs for the Enterprise - by Jim Handy - founder Objective Analysis. Among other things Jim says "Intel has announced an SSD whose performance is close to that of NAND flash at a price that is close to that of DRAM. How did that happen?" ...read the article Editor's comments:- As the new P4800X is not hot pluggable and as its main difference to previous flash SSDs from Intel is its support as a tiered memory - the most obvious role for a competitive comparison is memory channel based NVDIMM solutions - in particular the Memory1 product from Diablo which provides 128GB of flash as RAM per DIMM socket - and upto 2TB in a 2 socket server. Density comparison - Optane PCIe and Flash DDR-4 ...read more in SSD news .. .. 90% of the enterprise SSD companies which you know have no good reasons to survive. this way to market consolidation .. "Re Storage Class Memory... Intel, Micron and WDC have decided to jettison a program/erase (P/E) mechanism, namely quantum mechanical tunneling, that has been at the heart of NAND Flash since its inception in the late 1980's" - said Andrew Walker, Founder and CEO - Schiltron. what were the big SSD, storage and memory architecture ideas which emerged and came into sharp focus in 2016? .. In 2015 there were significant product announcements in the SSD market centered around rethinking enterprise RAM architecture and introducing new latency tiers in processor memory... What were the big SSD ideas of 2015? ... Intel was one of the top 3 SSD companies in 2014 says new SSD market report from TMR Editor:- September 18, 2015 - SSDs with capacities of 80GB and below accounted for approximately 36% of the $15 billion global SSD market revenue in 2014 according to a new market report - SSD Market - Trends and Forecast 2015 - 2022 ($4,795 133 pages) - published by Transparency Market Research - which also says that Samsung, Intel and SanDisk accounted for over 57% of market revenue. See also:- storage market research .. Intel will enter Memory Channel SSD market Editor:- August 24, 2015 - Back in July Intel and Micron unveiled a new bulk material based resistive memory nvRAM platform which they called 3D XPoint™ technology (later branded as Optane). At that time - the technical information about the memory technology were vague and lacking in detail. More details emerged during the shows which immediately followed (FMS and IDF) and here's a link with the webcast. Intel says cost per bit is likely to be somewhere between DRAM and nand flash. Latency is said to be 1,000x faster than nand but slower than DRAM. Storage density? A single chip can store 128Gb. Sampling? Later this year with production in 2016. Some of the many form factors and attach points which might benefit from this new technology are PCIe SSDs and Memory Channel SSDs. As with any new memory technology it will take time and experience to prove whether Optane memory has enterprise grade reliability. For this reason and due to the need to establish a new software ecosystem - early uses of the memory will probably be in experimental cloud appliances and consumer gaming devices. ...Later:- Initially I had serious doubts about the market readiness state of the Intel / Micron preannouncement because it appeared to leapfrog previously known memory offerings. And storage history has taught us 2 valuable lessons about new memories. the new memory is usually a small increment (2x, 4x etc) what was done before - to minimize the risk of new problems creeping into the next scaled geometry iteration, and I've heard such "market breakthough stories" from the anti-flash nvm world many times in the past 12 years - usually precipated by a need for more investment cash. Where can you find more reliable information about ReRAM? I've found a website which seems to have a more measured and informed approach to what has been happening in ReRAM land - and reading it may help you guess better when these advances might really intersect with the mainstream SSD market. Take a look at http://www.reram-forum.com See also:- flash and nvm news here on the mouse site .. Intel's new 2.5" PCIe SSDs Editor:- June 3, 2014 - Intel has announced details of new NVMe compatible 2.5" PCIe SSDs - the P3700 Series - which will offer upto 2TB (20nm) capacity in a 15mm high hot-swap form factor. .. New segmentation models are needed because the enterprise SSD market is moving into uncharted territories and use cases where a considerable proportion of the customer needs which affect buying behavior are still formally unrecognized as being significant (in market research data). Decloaking hidden and missing segments in the analysis and identification of market opportunities for enterprise rackmount flash .. How do SSDs compare with hard drives in notebook failure rates? Intel's own experience - based on a its employee population of around 100,000 notebooks - is that SSDs are 5x to 10x less likely to fail. SSD drive recovery from a manufacturer perspective (pdf) - paper presented by Intel at Flash Memory Summit August 2014 - see also:- Data Recovery for flash SSDs .. LSI blog discusses customer driven technology changes in the hyperscale datacenter Editor:- March 4, 2014 - "It's no longer enough to follow Intel's ticktock product roadmap" - says Rob Ober, Processor and System Architect LSI - in his new blog about Restructuring ecosystem - in which he goes on to say... "Development cycles for datacenter solutions used to be 3 to 5 years. But these cycles are becoming shorter." And when talking about rack scale architectures - Rob says "Traditionally new architectures were driven by OEMs, but that's not so true anymore." ...read the article .. Intel oems LSI's RAID caching SSD technology Editor:- April 8, 2013 - Intel - which already uses LSI's SandForce controllers in some SSDs - will oem LSI's dual-core RAID-on-Chip flash caching technology it was announced today. LSI says their caching technology can double the number of VDI sessions supported in the same sever and flash environment. See also:- SSD caching news, RAID and SSDs, SSD controllers .. a new reason to reconsider Intel SSDs Editor:- February 12, 2013 - Intel announced that in the next 30 days it will ship a Linux version of the SSD caching software - based on IP from its acquisition of NEVEX last August. The products have been rebranded as Intel® CAS (Cache Acceleration Software). ...more in SSD caching news . Can you trust SSD market data? Recent Strategic Transitions in SSD the Survivor's Guide to Enterprise SSDs the big market impact of SSD dark matter Efficiency - making the same SSD - with less flash . Intel paper - Data Integrity on 20nm flash SSDs Editor:- August 22, 2012 - "Avoid skepticism and seek understanding" - is one of the calls to action in Intel's paper - Data Integrity on 20nm SSDs (pdf) - presented today at the Flash Memory Summit In a bold move at the start, the author - Robert Frickey - brings to the fore the subject of flaky SSDs and firmware bugs and recalls - naming several SSD vendors in this context - including Intel. He says "Despite datasheet metrics, it's not easy to predict behavior of SSDs in the field. Validation should be considered as part of data integrity." Even if you've already read many other articles on SSD data integrity - this paper clearly communicates some fundamentals about flash cells and the variety of different types of disturb errors which makes it a useful educational document. In tone with what some other leading SSD companies are saying too - the author urges you to "Understand your usage model and endurance requirements. Innovate around application needs." ...read the article (pdf) .. what's the life-time of Intel's new PCIe SSD? Editor:- April 12, 2012 - Intel today launched a new fast-enough PCIe MLC SSD - the 910 Series has upto 800GB capacity ($3,859) and 180K / 75K R/W IOPS (4K blocks). UBER is 1 sector per 1016 bits read. Editor's comments:- endurance is quoted as 14PB - which assuming a 1 in 3 write to read ration and maximum throughput rates (1GB/s writes and 2GB/s reads respectively) means the device could wear out in less than 3 months. That would require an artificially created scenario of R/W activity to achieve - but indicates that enterprise users still have to worry about the safety margins of various flash flavors in intense server apps. Another way Intel quotes the same endurance is it "allows up to 10 full drive writes a day for 5 years." That's a perfectly valid way to describe enterprise SSDs - and other SSD vendors (STEC etc) use the same kind of formula - but a good enough figure for a SAS SSD may not be what you need in a PCIe SSD and it demonstrates the difference between general purpose and intensive caching roles. I've heard many stories about enterprise SSD customers whose SSDs did wear out after 3 to 6 months. The answer is to buy the right kind of SSD for the particular apps environment - preceeded by measurement, analysis and modelling of what the SSD workload is likely to be. . Intel's fastest SSD uses SandForce inside Editor:- February 6, 2012 - Intel today announced it has used SandForce controllers for the first time in its new (and fastest) SATA 3 2.5" SSD - the Intel SSD 520 - which (with upto 80K R/W IOPS peak - 4KB) is aimed at gaming, CAD and graphics content creation markets. Price- based on 1,000-unit quantities is - 60GB for $149, 120GB at $229, 180GB at $369, 240GB at $509 and 480GB at $999. "We worked closely with Intel to leverage their deep understanding of the NAND flash, ultimately providing a unique and optimized solution for client computing applications with the LSI SandForce Flash Storage Processor," said Michael Raam, VP and GM of LSI's Flash Components Division. . Intel would like to be where Fusion-io's SSDs are now... snuggling up close to the CPU Editor:- October 11, 2011 - an article in VR-Zone discusses a "leaked" Intel SSD roadmap which indicates the company may enter the PCIe SSD market in 2012. It's hardly a revelation - because Intel is member of technical groups which are co-ordinating standards in this segment of the SSD market - and until standards for the Hybrid Memory Cube get established (which could take another 3 years) - the PCIe SSD market is the closest attachment that an SSD can make to an Intel server host processor bus. And PCIe has the additional attraction of not needing 3rd party storage interface glue - unlike SATA, SAS, FC and IB - thereby giving more control to any chip company which does it right. Over 30 companies have already shipped PCIe SSDs in the past 3 years. This will be a multi-billion dollar market segment according to StorageSearch.com's long range enterprise SSD market model. . SSD power down management Why should you care what happens in an SSD when the power goes down? This important design feature - which barely rates a mention in most SSD datasheets and press releases - has a strong impact on SSD data integrity and operational reliability. This article will help you understand why some SSDs which (work perfectly well in one type of application) might fail in others... even when the changes in the operational environment appear to be negligible. If you thought endurance was the end of the SSD reliability story - think again. ...read the article . First you learned about SLC (good flash). Then you learned about MLC (naughty flash when it played in the enterprise - but good enough for the short attention span of consumers). Then MLC SSDs learned how to be good. Now some MLC is much nicer than others. - When it's preceded by an "e" (extra-good). But it costs more. But other people say you don't need the expensive "e" - because their controllers empathize better with naughty flash. (They really care about naughty flash being sent to bad block jail too soon.) Is your head ready to explode yet? It's going to get even more complicated. ......from sugaring MLC for the enterprise . .

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