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SSD
clairvoyants
the
Fastest SSDs
the SSD Buyers Guide
Can you trust flash SSD
specs?
3
Easy Ways to Enter the SSD Market
Data Integrity
Challenges in flash SSD Design |
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The market for small
form factor SSDs and HDDs (1.0"
and smaller) has seen a lot of changes in suppliers, technology and
applications in the past decade. Once the exclusive preserve of the military,
spooks and space scientists this market is now dominated by the needs of
shoppers for consumer lifestyle and entertainment gadgets.
Influential
pioneers in this market shift were 3 companies:- M-Systems, Toshiba and
Cornice.
- M-Systems -
developed the market concept of the DiskOnChip.
In
2001 M-Systems'
DiskOnChip flash SSD offered 16MB capacity in a single 48-pin TSOP (Thin
Small Outline Package). By 2006, when the company was acquired by
SanDisk, the DiskOnChip
capacity had grown to gigabytes. The primary application at the time was mobile
phone handsets.
- Toshiba - showed a
prototype 0.85" hard drive in
January 2004.
With 4GB capacity it was the world's physically smallest hard drive at
the time. When launching the new form factor Toshiba said "the 0.85"
HDD is expected to boost the functionality of a new generation of products,
including mobile phones, digital audio players, PDAs, digital still cameras,
camcorders and external storage devices."
- Unlike the other 2 companies above which drifted in from the military or
notebook markets - Cornice
was a startup whose sole reason for existence for the small form factor
consumer storage market.
Cornice aspired to become the leading
supplier of hard disks to the phone market, and various other markets like
mobile music players and video cameras.
Cornice's 2GB Storage Element
appeared in some products shown at
CES in 2004.
In 2004 I said "Cornice's Storage Element does for disk drives
what the original RISC concept did for CISC CPUs. It's like a Reduced
Instruction Set hard drive which cuts out the unneeded Complexity."
The product turned out to be risky in the conventional sense for the investors
who had put $81 million into the company. A combination of patent lawsuits and
market developments in flash SSDs put paid to their ambitions within a few
years of launching their first product. Since those early pioneering
days in the miniature storage drive market the competition has got much
tougher.
This is a market where potential unit shipments read like
telephone numbers. One good reason (as you already know by now) is the potential
to put small storage drives into cell phones to store music, pictures and video.
Then you can add in the markets for PDAs, music players and digital cameras.
Plus satellite navigators in cars, games, toys. When you've got a potential
market size measured in billions of units - it seems needless to overburden the
calculations by adding in more specialized embedded industrial products, or
medical instrumentation, security systems etc.
In 2007 - Joe
Koyanagi (who was at that time US Sales Manager at
Hagiwara Sys-Com)
impressed on me the future importance of what he called the "1 inch"
SSD form factor (a convenient phrase for very small form factor SSD chips and
modules - none of which are actually 1 inch in size).
He said - "1
inch is the next 2.5 inch!" - And he predicted that a directory of 1 inch
SSDs would soon be needed on StorageSearch.com.
How right he was.
Today, in October 2009, our
1" SSD directory
lists 30 manufacturers of SSDs, DOMs & HDDs which are 1.0"
approx and under. | |
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""He's
probably just as scared of us"
said Megabyte, not very convincingly.
"Shut
up! And keep peddling" said his niece. | |
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