"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 | | |
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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 | | |
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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." |
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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. |
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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".
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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 | | |
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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? | | |
... |
|
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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. | | |
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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 | | |
.. |
|
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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 |
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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) | | |
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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. |
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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. | | | |
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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.
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"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. | | | |
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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.
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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. |
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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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