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If
Megabyte got into
serious trouble he'd
call - Help! - to his niece Kilobyte who was a
great fan of
Emma Peel
in the Avengers. | |
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| "Fast purge SSDs
are the very antithesis of ideal consumer / enterprise SSDs - because they are
designed to defeat data recovery. " |
| ...from:-
fast purge flash SSDs | | |
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new SSD module for mobile
military systems
Editor:- April 22, 2013 -Curtiss-Wright
today
announced
the availability of conduction cooled secure 1TB SATA SLC SSD modules
for use in its rugged 4 port NAS module which is designed to fit on an ARINC
tray.
The
Vortex
SSD - designed for applications such as helicopters, UAVs and mobile
radar systems - is certified to FIPS 140-2 and provides 4 modes of key
management.
Crocus gets funding for x8 multibit magnetic semiconductor memory
Editor:-
April 8, 2013 -
Crocus Technology
today
announced it has
been awarded a contract from IARPA
to develop an 8-bit per cell memory based on its Magnetic Logic Unit
technology.
This will greatly reduce the energy consumed per
written-bit compared to any other memory technology, including DRAM, Flash,
SRAM and MRAM.
Douglas
Lee, VP, product development at Crocus compared the 8 bits per cell
which the company thinks it can get from its MLU technology with the
state-of-the-art in nand flash - which is 3-4 bits per cell and also compared
to alternative magnetic semiconductor technologies like MRAM - which is
still only 1 bit per cell storage (SLC).
Editor's comments:-
here's some context.
If it were possible to do x8 MLC flash - then
Samsung's
model
840 SSD would have 16TB capacity instead of the 512GB which it has using
x3 (TLC) - which is the state of the art bits per cell shipping in a
regular 2.5" SSD.
But don't get too excited by this comparison as
x8 flash
currently exists only in the realm of science fiction.
Having
multibit capability in a magnetic semiconductor cell will undoubtedly be a
breakthrough for that type of non volatile technology. But the density of such
x8 MLU memories would still be 100x smaller than today's flash. The good
news is that unlike flash - MLU will operate at very hot ambient temperatures -
past 200 degrees C.
Steve Picot joins ViON as VP of Federal Sales
Editor:-
February 18, 2013 - ViON
today announced that
Steve Picot
has recently been named VP of Federal Sales.
Just prior to joining
ViON, Mr. Picot was an 8 year veteran of Cisco Systems where he was the
Director of Operations. Mr. Picot was honorably discharged from the US Marine
Corps as a Captain after serving over 7 years as an AH-1 helicopter pilot.
Diablo sets up compatibility team for new SSD interface
Editor:- January 29, 2013 - Diablo Technologies
today
announced
it has set a compatibility advisory team for its new SSD interface - which
the company is apparently positioning as a faster alternative to
PCIe SSDs.
experimental technique eliminates flash endurance limit
Editor:-
December 2, 2012 - An article in IEEE
Spectrum -
Flash
Memory Survives 100 Million Cycles - summarizes a recent research paper by
Macronix -
which described an experimental technique to redesign flash cells to improve
endurance.
The
technique - which StorageSearch.com does not think is feasible to scale for
commercially competitive memory densities - involves designing addressable
heaters in the memory array which can pulse upto 800 degrees C for a few
milliseconds. This thermal "refreshing cycle" anneals the chip
material and heals common wear-out defects while also enabling the cells to be
run faster.
"Afterward, we realized that there was no new physics
principle invented here, and we could have done this 10 years ago" said
Hang-Ting Lue,
the project director at Macronix
Microsemi' speeds up fast SSD erase
Editor:-
October 23, 2012 - Microsemi
today
announced a new
faster erasing 2.5" industrial SSD.
The SECURRE-Stor (upto
128GB) can perform a first level software fast-erase in 0.1S followed by a
fully destructive hardware erase in less than 10 seconds.
The company
says applications include secure laptops, automated teller machines and other
systems currently using hard disk drives that may need to be physically
destroyed to prevent data from getting into the wrong hands.
temperature related data rot in flash SSDs... a blog by WD
Editor:-
July 26, 2012 - A good analysis of temperature affects on flash data integrity
can be seen in a recent blog - about
intrinsic
temperature related data rot in flash SSDs - by Eli Tiomkin,
Director, Business Development,
WD Solid State Storage
who says (among other things) - "Over time, NAND cells may lose enough
charge and flip enough bits to overwhelm the ECC capability of the drive
controller and cause data loss."
Eli Tiomkin's useful table lets
you look up the SSD storage temperature and see how much more quickly the
native flash will corrupt - if a suitable
controller or healing
process isn't in place to detect changes and fix them....read
the article
CWCDS offers 5TB version of SANbric SSD JBOD
Editor:-
June 19, 2012 - today Curtiss-Wright
Controls Defense Solutions announced a new version of its
FC compatible SSDs the
SANbric
which supports just under 5TB and weighs about 5 lbs and is designed for
deployment in high speed rugged
data streaming apps such as on-board wide body aircraft, and helicopter
platforms.
Microsemi eliminates weakest link in high capacity SATA SSDs
Editor:-
April 9, 2012 -
Microsemi
today announced it is
offering a new type of ruggedized SATA connector option for its its
TRRUST-Stor SSDs which
provides a complete vibration-resistant solution which eliminates pin fretting
and intermittent disconnects to assure long-term dependability.
"The
weakest link in many embedded applications is the connector, which can sabotage
the operation of critical hardware," said B J Heggli, VP
of Strategic Development for Microsemi. "Our new connector family protects
against the effects of severe shock and vibration, which safeguards the flow of
data. As a result, we can now offer customers what is perhaps the most secure
and rugged SSD available on the market."
TCS ships 200GB fast erase MIL-STD-810 2.5" SSD
Editor:-
January 24, 2012 -
TCS today
announced shipments of a rugged 200GB 2.5" SLC SSD which has has been
verified by outside labs to meet MIL-STD-810 requirements for shock, vibration,
temperature range, temperature shock, humidity and altitude.
The new
Galatea
SSD has 40K IOPS performance, includes 128-bit AES
encryption and can
fast erase the full
drive in less than 15 seconds.
"Few solid-state drives combine the
quality, data capacity and ruggedization features of Galatea," said Michael
Bristol, senior VP and GM of TCS' Government Solutions Group. "It
is ideal for a wide range of extreme industrial and defense applications,
including oil and gas exploration, avionics and data logging in a variety of
air, land and sea vehicles. Galatea combines superior access latency and power
consumption performance with long-term reliability."
Editor's comments:- I hadn't heard of TCS before in the SSD
market - and I feel uncomfortable when I see a significant new SSD product pop
out from seemingly nowhere. But then I recognized one of the legacy products
names - Triton and sure enough TCS is the new identity for
Trident Space &
Defense - which was acquired a year ago.
I googled "Galatea"
- and I'd like to think it was named after one of the
Harry Potter characters
- who taught defence against the dark arts.
Later today:-
Charlie Cassidy who
is Director of the Advanced Products Group at TCS contacted me to say - "I
thought I would let you in on the "secret" of the Galatea name. No
Harry Potter involved, we didn't even realize that connection. Our SSDs (Triton,
Proteus, Galatea) are named after themoons
of Neptune - paying homage to the Trident heritage."
Conduction cooled rugged NAS SSDs find seats in war-planes
Editor:-
November 1, 2011 - Curtiss-Wright
today announced that it has received a contract from Lockheed Martin
Aeronautics to provide its rugged conduction cooled NAS SSDs -
Vortex CNS
products - to the U.S. Air Force's
HC/MC-130J
Super Hercules aircraft program.
The initial order is valued at
$800,000, with a potential lifetime contract value estimated at $7.5 million.
Editor's comments:- using ethernet connected rugged SSDs
on-board transport is a well established idea. Back in 2002 we ran ads for
an early NAS flash SSD - a product called the
NAS-168F.
Some
of the SSDs used in military
projects nowadays are very sophisticated network devices as well as being very
rugged. For example the TuffServ
480 - an iSCSI SSD system designed by
Ampex .
Meanwhile
if you're talking about luggable SSD storage for real-time data capture -
Texas Memory Systems
offers a 4U specially shielded variant of their enterprise rackmount SSDs for
airborne applications - called the
RamSan-640.
At
the other end of the weight scale -
Targa's 2.5"
Removable DTU's are small
enough to be panel mounted in cockpit systems.
SMART samples new MIL SATA 3 SSD
Editor:- October
26, 2011 - SMART
today
announced
imminent sampling of a SATA
3 version of its MIL-STD-810
compliant 2.5" SSD family - which includes encryption and
fast erase.
The
new Xcel-200 provides from 60GB to 240GB
SLC capacity,
500MB/s sequential R/W speeds and 60K/40K random R/W
IOPS. It
operates at standard
industrial
temperature ranges and is certified for operation at altitudes up to 80,000
ft.
Fusion-io can do secure erase in less than 60 seconds
Editor:-
September 15, 2011 - Fusion-io
today
announced
that its new SureErase data
sanitization tool has been confirmed as meeting Department of Defense
sanitization standards by the Defense Information Systems Agency.
SureErase
enables users to securely remove/erase all data on any ioMemory-based
technology, following DoD/NIST standards, regardless of capacity, in less than 1
minute.
Editor's comments:- although that sounds like a long
time - relative to fast
purge SSDs (and it is too long for some applications) nevertheless when you
take into account that many of Fusion-io's PCIe SSDs have multi-terabyte
capacities - it's impressive. See also:-
disk sanitizers
I wish I had an SSD in Iraq
Editor:- August 23, 2011
- the problems caused by
sand blowing into hard drives in
the context of a desert war - is the subject of a recent blog by Mark Flournoy,
VP of Government & Defense at STEC.
Among
other things this article shows the consequences of data storage failures. It's
the best blog I've seen so far on STEC's previously anemic SSD blog site.
...read the article .
Microsemi reports shake rattle and roll SSD results
Editor:-
May 19, 2011 - Microsemi
today announced that its TRRUST-STOR
(2.5" rugged SSDs) are the industry's first SSDs to pass zero-failure
testing at vibration
levels that are consistent with the industry's most severe environments.
"No other SSD manufacturers have published zero-failure results
at this level of vibration testing, which was conducted while our drives were
fully operational, reading and writing data," said Jack Bogdanski, director
of marketing for Microsemi. "The ability for SSDs to perform flawlessly
under adverse environmental conditions is becoming increasingly important for
applications where it is critical that data be protected at all times."
Microsemi's SSD units were pre-conditioned at 85°C for 336
hours.
Emphase launches 2.5" MIL SSD family
Editor:-
May 11, 2011 - Emphase
today
launched a new
range of rugged, MIL-STD-810F compliant 2.5" SATA SLC SSDs - which are
currently available with upto 128GB capacity.
The
MIL-SPEC S5
SSD has R/W speeds upto 170 / 90MB/sec respectively and
fast erase. Should
the drive lose power during a protect, erase, or destroy command, the device
will resume the operation as soon as power is restored. Standard product has
high tolerance for high altitudes, shock, vibration, temperature, and humidity -
options include conformal coating.
Fusion-io aims to accelerate MIL bots
Editor:- May
2, 2011 - Fusion-io
today
announced
that it will participate in the Coalition
Warrior Interoperability Demonstration - an annual
event that engages
cutting-edge information technology focusing on operational shortfalls
identified by combatant commanders and government agencies.
"More
than ever, rapid interpretation of multiple points of data in real-world,
wartime environments can mean the difference between life or death for soldiers
and civilians," said
Fred Vasofsky,
Fusion-io Director of Federal Systems. "Fusion-io understands how
critically important it is for warfighters and analysts to be able to quickly
and correctly interpret field data. Through our participation in CWID, our
military leaders will be able to assess how our technology can make a
significant contribution to the defense and disaster response-related activities
of our nation and allies."
Editor's comments:- many
early SSD
makers started in the
defense market and
then later diversified into civilian markets. It's been unusual for the flow
to go the other way. But this announcement by Fusion-io shows that enterprise
technologies which speed critical decision making (by people or bots) can
migrate from civilian to defense applications if they are fast enough and
deemed to be reliable
enough to make a worthwhile difference.
SSD Bookmarks - from Foremay's CTO
Editor:-
March 1, 2011 - StorageSearch.com
today published
SSD Bookmarks
- suggested by Jack H
Winters, CTO, Foremay
.
Jack H Winters' suggestions are focused on the topic of
managing data security in flash SSDs (both in working and not working devices).
These links take you on a tour of the published state of the art in fast /
secure SSD data erase and the related issue of SSD encryption.
CWCEC launches new rugged XMC/PMC SATA SSD
Editor:-
December 3, 2010 - Curtiss-Wright
launched the XMC-552
- a rugged 256GB XMC/PMC form factor
SATA SSD with 200MB/s
throughput, fast purge
(in 4 seconds), bad
block blocking and 128-bit AES encryption - for
defense and aerospace
applications.
Dataram's SSD ASAP accelerates rocket defense science
Editor:-
November 18, 2010 - ever since the first
SSD ASAPs came to
market just over a year ago - I've been curious to know what type of real
customers would get a benefit from this new type of technology.
Dataram this week
provided a clue. It
says
that Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab has purchased and
installed Dataram's XcelaSAN
acceleration appliance for use in its missile defense research. Dataram also
provides server and workstation
memory products to JHU/APL.
SMART's new 2.5" defense SSD juggles 30K IOPS
Editor:-
October 10, 2010 - SMART
announced
it is sampling a new 2.5" 200GB SATA SLC flash SSD for mission-critical
defense and industrial
applications.
The
Xcel-100
solid-state drive achieves up to 30,000 IOPS random read/write and 250MB/s
sustained read/write. Validated to MIL-STD-810F it's designed to operate in a
temperature range that extends from -40°C to +85°C, with the ability
to sustain 50g operating shock and 16.4g operating vibration.
The
Xcel-100 offers high reliability
and data integrity
(< 1 in 1017 bits read) that is supported by extensive
error-correction and detection capabilities, multi-level data-path and code
protection, data-fail recovery, and data-integrity monitoring. The Xcel-100 also
supports the ATA-7 Security Erase. feature for applications where
data elimination is
required.
Texas Memory Systems' founder writes about 20 years of DoD SSDs
Editor:-
September 20, 2010 - Holly Frost founder of Texas Memory Systems
has written a paper (pdf)
which describes how variants of the company's newer SSDs like the
RamSan-630 have been used
recently by the US DoD and Intelligence Community.
In
another article he
describes some features of their 1st DoD SSD in 1988. The company launched its
1st commercial enterprise SSDs in 2001 - but has continued evolving its
defense based array processing capabilities.
Update on the smallest PATA SSD
Editor:- August 18,
2010 - Micross
Components indicated that a future version of its
microSSD
(the world's smallest PATA
SSD - which has a footprint of 14 x 24 x 1.3mm and weighs only 0.8 grams)
may be offered with extended operation upto 105 degrees C.
new directory of old style (parallel) SCSI SSDs
Editor:-
July 10, 2010 - StorageSearch.com
today published a new directory of
(parallel) SCSI SSDs.
SCSI
SSDs aren't exactly a new topic in the
history of
the SSD market. I benchmarked a SCSI SSD 20 years ago for use with an
embedded SPARC server. And there was a time when 95% of SSD manufacturers
made SCSI SSDs. Today that figure is 8%..
This is a market which has
resisted the upward suction of the
SSD market bubble.
Despite that - I know from many reader inquiries that customers with legacy
servers, and equipment designers with legacy products still search for SCSI
drives - and in many cases SSDs
are replacing HDDs -
simply because the original hard disk manufacturers have end of lifed SCSI
models. But many of the new SCSI SSDs available today aren't simply fossilized
versions of old designs. They include new security, performance and reliability
features.
As an editor - creating a new SCSI SSD list has been low on
my priorities - because I thought the market had nearly gone away - and I
hoped I wouldn't have to do it. I was wrong. More SCSI SSDs are being shipped
today than at any time in the past. It's never going to be a huge market - but
for those of you who have been looking -
here it is.
flash SSD integrity architectures for space-craft
Editor:-
April 13, 2010 - for those interested in
flash SSD data
integrity issues - Phil White, President of ECC Technologies has
released a white paper -
NAND Flash
Memories for Spacecraft (doc).
Phil has been working with ECC for
almost 37 years and his company is developing future ECC designs to
allow systems architects to develop
NAND flash memories that
are highly reliable
and fault-tolerant even if the NAND flash chips themselves are not so reliable.
NASA is using ECC Tek's designs in
multiple missions. 2 of the designs are in space at the present time and are
working perfectly. Phil White recently wrote a document for NASA and
JPL which outlines how to design NAND
Flash memories for spacecraft. The 22 page "preview" document
excludes confidential data but gives a taste of the technology available for
licensing. ...read the
article
Radar buffs get 8GB XMC
Editor:- March 25, 2010 -
Curtiss-Wright
today announced it has
doubled the memory from 4GB to 8GB on its
MM-617
buffer memory XMC card - which is designed to provide volatile, deep storage
for a wide range of military applications including RADAR, signal intelligence,
and image processing.
Editor's comments:- customers always want more memory for
this type of application. In one project I managed in 1991 - we designed a
system which captured radar data and streamed it continuously to 16 x 6U of the
fastest COTS memory cards then available at the maximum operating speed of the
VMEbus. That required weeding out badly designed backplanes and memory cards -
and playing with early generations of
Altera FPGAs.
It was similar projects streaming to hard disk arrays (and analyzing the data
ASAP) where I learned a lot of useful things about storage too.
Viking's DOM MIL certified
Editor:- March 3, 2010 -
Viking Modular Solutions
today
announced
that its SATA Cube3 128GB DOM
(launched in March
2009) has successfully completed tests pursuant to the
MIL-STD-810F
specification.
Aitech's new XMC SSD
Editor:- February 18, 2010 -
Aitech launched
a new model in its family of
PMC/XMC
SSDs.
The
M224 has 128GB capacity, and
hardware RAID options
which support the onboard flash array. Sustained sequential R/W speeds are
170MB/s and 120MB/s respectively. The M224 is available in air-cooled and
conduction-cooled versions as well as in 3 levels of
ruggedization
depending on shock, vibration and humidity requirements. OS support includes
VxWorks, Windows and Linux.
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| .... |
| "...even at sea
level - cosmic rays can create silent errors in flash memory - which are
harder to detect and fix than in RAM." |
| ...from - Radiation Hardness of Flash and
Nanoparticle Memories - cited in
the SSD reliability
papers | | |
suggested articles and directories
1" SSDs
PATA SSDs
parallel SCSI SSDs
flash SSD
capacity - the iceberg syndrome
Data Integrity
Challenges in flash SSD Design
the top 50 SSD
articles on StorageSearch.com
Clarifying SSD Pricing -
where does all the money go?
other useful publications
COTS Journal
Military Embedded Systems
Military & Aerospace Electronics
. |
Military &
Rugged Storage
by Zsolt Kerekes,
editor |
Military projects started using SSDs as
early as the
1970s
because they were faster, more rugged and more
reliable than
hard drives.
By
the late 1980s SSDs with standard 5.25"
hard disk form factors
and interfaces such as SCSI
were easily available in the market (and evaluated for projects by the editor)
but those were RAM SSDs
rather than flash SSDs.
In
the late 1980s some military manufacturers had started to offer special
modules which could cushion hard drives from vibration. But wide deployments of
HDDs in mobile
applications were precluded by their unreliability (much worse than today),
their inability to operate over extended temperature ranges or at high
altitudes without significant data corruption.
Although flash memory
products were widely used in embedded military systems - they were mainly used
as arrays of chips which were directly compatible with the processor bus -
rather than as virtualized hard drives.
By the end of the 1990s true
flash SSDs (mostly
with a parallel SCSI
interface) were more commonplace (for those who could afford them) - and
companies such as
Adtron,
BiTMICRO,
Memtech and
M-Systems had been
evolving flash SSDs to directly replace hard drives in rugged and
space constrained
applications.
In 1999 -
BiTMICRO launched an
18GB 3.5" flash SSD and in the years which followed military flash SSD
makers expanded their capabilities with respect to capacity, performance,
encryption and sanitization. And at price tags of $10k to $40k per unit they
definitely weren't consumer products.
From about 2003 business managers
in military SSD companies could see
market reports
which suggested that the market for SSDs would eventually be much bigger as the
declining price of memory brought these products within the budgetary reach of
more enterprise SSD
users and later became
cheap enough for
consumers.
Although there are many similarities in the
controller
architecture and technology of consumer SSDs and military SSDs - because of a
shared design heritage - there are important differences too. These go far
beyond the
MLC vs SLC
endurance
and data integrity
issues which affect some heavy duty (high
IOPS)
commercial server apps.
What can be confusing, is that some
manufacturers offer products for
consumer,
enterprise,
industrial and
military markets.
Because there is no standard method for defining
what is an SSD
and what features are included and what others are not - it's important for
specifiers in this market to understand as many of the
constituent parts of
SSDs as they can - and what part they can play in a successful deployment. That
should include a tick list of important features - most of which are not
tested in
performance evaluations.
I've long held the view that when it comes to
reliability
technologies - where the military leads- the commercial markets follow typically
5 to 10 years later.
Many of the techniques which are now widely used
in enterprise flash SSDs such as
wear leveling were
pioneered by military and industrial SSD companies.
Other techniques
such as SSD
power management, thermal and EMI compatibility are lessons which came from
rugged industrial and military markets and have a value and utility which
many commercial systems designers don't yet fully appreciate. But I'm sure they
will when they learn
more about SSDs. |
|
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| this way to the Petabyte
SSD |
In 2016 there will be
just 3 types of
SSD in the datacenter.
One
of them doesn't exist yet - the bulk storage SSD.
It will replace the
last remaining strongholds of
hard drives in the
datacenter due to its unique combination of characteristics, low running costs
and operational advantages. |
 |
... |
The new model of the
datacenter - how we get from here to there - and the technical problems which
will need to be solved - are just some of the ideas explored in this
visionary article. | | | |
| . |
| Fast Purge SSDs when
"Rugged"
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.
|
 |
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.
| | | |
| . |
What's the
best way to design a flash SSD?
and other questions which split SSD
opinion |
| More than 10 key areas of
fundamental disagreement within the SSD industry are discussed in an article
here on StorageSearch.com called
the
the SSD Heresies. |
 |
... |
Why can't SSD's true believers agree upon
a single coherent vision for the future of solid state storage? ...read the article | | | |
| . |
| Power, Speed and
Strength in SSD brands |
Does what marketers call
their SSDs impact who SSD buyers will call?
This article surveys
how vendors have played with awesome and mundane words to make their SSDs
sound better - with examples from across the whole spectrum of the SSD market
- the good, the bad and you know how this goes - because a
Clint Eastward
movie made 45 years ago is still better known than any SSD today. |
 |
And that's the challenge
which wannabe T-Rexes in the SSD market have to meet.
...read the
article | | | |
| . |
|
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