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Samsung's New
SSD Game Plan
Editor:- August 12, 2009 - Samsung Electronics
announced it is
targeting
the PC gaming industry with its 256GB SSD.
This seems to confirm the
consumer-led focus
of the company's business strategy. Earlier StorageSearch.com had said it
doesn't think Samsung's SSD product marketing is good enough to achieve
success in the enterprise server market.
Samsung's earlier
generations of SSDs
a few years
ago - were lamentably slow compared to others at the time from
Mtron. So those earlier
Samsung SSD products were not much use to PC gamers.
Samsung's so
called "SSD strategy" looks like the classical case of designing
products it can make - and then looking around to see how this fits in with what
users might need - rather than anticipating user markets and designing products
that match them well.
But to give the company credit - Samsung was
the world's first multi-billion dollar storage company to declare SSDs a
strategic market - which it did back in 2005.
STEC Samples 6Gb/s SAS SSDs
Editor:- August 11, 2009
- STEC today
said
it will ship 6Gb/s SAS
flash SSDs in both 2.5"
and 3.5" form
factors in Q4.
STEC's new ZeusIOPS SSDs will deliver 80,000 IOPS
random read, 40,000 IOPS random write with transfer speeds of 550MB/s read and
300MB/s write.
STEC also said it's
sampling
a faster version of its 3.5"
FC compatible SSDs.
STEC
also announced a new policy of offering
MLC flash
in so called "enterprise class SSDs".
"While we
believe our core customers will continue to rely on and demand our industry
leading SLC based SSDs, it is apparent that several of our price sensitive OEM
customers are now looking for SSD alternatives which only a true MLC based SSD
can deliver" said Manouch Moshayedi, Chairman and CEO of STEC.
Editor's
comments:- the attraction of stuffing flash SSD arrays with
MLC instead of SLC
is simply - price.
Fusion-io's CTO -
David Flynn recently told me there is as much as a 4x difference in
price between MLC and SLC NAND flash.
Proponents of MLC enterprise
flash SSDs say their SSD
controllers do more than simply attenuate write cycles to a level where
you don't need to worry about
endurance.
SandForce,
for example, says its SSD processor understands chip geometries and minimizes
read disturb errors.
In my view there are risks in using MLC flash in
some types of enterprise apps - which go far beyond than the endurance problem -
as I described in Are
MLC SSDs Ever Safe in Enterprise Apps? Nevertheless there are some
enterprise applications where low levels of data corruption / data loss are
tolerable - for example streaming video servers. Cautious users could get the
best of both worlds by partitioning their SSD accelerator zones between SLC
and MLC according to the risk / reward preferences for different data sets
within their applications.
Hitachi Ships "Enterprise class" 2TB HDD
Editor:-
August 11, 2009 - Hitachi
started shipping the
Ultrastar
A7K2000 - a 3.5", 2TB, 7,200 RPM,
SATA
hard drive for
applications such as data warehousing,
disk-to-disk backup, cloud
computing and massive scale-out storage.
SMART Announces MIL-STD-810F 256GB 2.5" SATA SSDs
Editor:-
August 11, 2009 - SMART
Modular Technologies announced a new range of
rugged
2.5" 256GB SSDs for
defense applications
that will ship next month.
The
SATA compatible SSDs
are 16mm high. Data
declassification compliance is implemented by the company's EraSure
technology. The models comply with MIL-STD-810F environmental specifications for
operating shock, vibration, humidity and altitude, and each drive passes a
demanding 8 hour, full-temperature range
burn-in test prior to
shipment.
"SMART's new 256GB SSDs are ideal for applications such as
tactical fighters and unmanned aerial vehicles because they require a
combination of high storage density, extreme ruggedness, high reliability,
defense-grade data security, and low power," explained Mark Dupaul, SMART's
Senior Product Marketing Manager. "Fortunately, the continuing price
decline of SSDs is making it more affordable to use them in applications that
require high-capacity storage."
SandForce's 2.5" 34nm SSDs Now Available
Editor:-
August 11, 2009 - SandForce
announced the availability of the
SF-1000 family
Evaluation 2.5" SSD
featuring 34nm flash from Micron.
"It's
important that we have a tight, collaborative working relationship with the
Flash vendors that we support in order to understand how to best optimize the
total SSD solution," said Thad Omura, VP of Marketing for SandForce. "We're
delighted to demonstrate our DuraClass SSD processor technology (this week at
the Flash Memory Summit )
working with Micron's industry-leading NAND Flash products, showing a high
quality and reliable SSD solution."
Intel Promises 3-bits-per-cell MLC Flash for Christmas
Editor:-
August 11, 2009 - Intel
and Micron Technology
today
announced
the development of a new 3-bit-per-cell MLC NAND technology, leveraging their
34nm geometry process.
The new 32Gb chips, expected to ship in
the 4th quarter, will typically be used in consumer storage devices such as
flash cards and
USB drives, where high
density and cost-efficiency are paramount.
Analyst
comments:- from Jim Handy,
Objective
Analysis - "The chip is not for all markets. Just as SLC NAND was
once thought to be poorly suited to SSDs, then
poorly suited to
enterprise SSDs, this chip, with a very low
endurance
level, is currently being promoted by the companies as a device well suited to
USB flash drives and flash cards for cameras and cell phones, but the companies
explained that they need more experience in production volumes before they will
be confident to position it as a chip suitable for the high-write environment of
the SSD."
See also:-
adaptive DSP
ECC in flash, MLC
versus SLC in enterprise SSDs,
flash care claims
TB/hr NAS Indexing
Editor:- August 11, 2009 - Ever
wondered how long it would take to index your corporate data to make it easily
searchable?
Index Engines
today published a
useful
benchmark answering that question.
They sustained 1 Terabyte
per hour on a NAS system
from BlueArc. Base
price for the software is $85,000, and they say you should allow 4% to 8% of
the target storage as an indexing overhead.
I thought it would be
interesting to see how this compares to
Google's hardware
search appliance .
Google has published lots of
case studies
here - but I couldn't find a single magic number in the brief time before my
attention span moved on to the next thing ambushing my to-do list.
Why Consumers Can Expect More Flaky Flash SSDs!
Editor:-
August 10, 2009 - a new
article published today in StorageSearch.com
explains why the consumer flash SSD quality problem is not going to get
better any time soon.
You know what I mean. Product recalls, firmware upgrades,
performance downgrades and bad behavior which users did not anticipate from
reading glowing magazine product reviews. And that's if they can get hold of
the new products in the first place.
We predicted this unreliability
scenario many years ago. And you have to get used to it. The new article
explains why it's happening and gives some suggested workarounds for navigating
in a world of imperfect flash SSD product marketing. ...read the article |
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| 11 Years of
StorageSearch.com |
Editor:- August 12, 2009 -
Exactly 11 years ago today I registered the domain name StorageSearch.com.
I'd
already been publishing workstation and server product directories since
1992 - and
readers had asked me to do something similar for the storage market.
StorageSearch.com
went live in September
1998 with several features including the 1st continuously updated online
directory for the RAID systems
market. |
 |
In a celebration article
next month I'll be reviewing the biggest changes in the storage market in the
past decade - and predicting what it will look like in 10 years time.
Spellerbyte will polish up his
crystal ball so we can
see what lies ahead more clearly. | | | |
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