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| Crocus Ports
MRAM to Tower Fab |
Editor:- June 18,
2009 -
Tower Semiconductor,
announced
it has taken an equity position (value approx $1.25 million) in Crocus Technologies,
and announced it is porting Crocus's
MRAM
to its 200mm wafer fab.
Editor's comments:- Crocus's
whitepaper -
the
Emergence of Practical MRAM (pdf) - gives the best explanation I've seen of
why, despite so many companies entering the MRAM market, so few useful products
have actually come out. It describes flaws in the intrinsic technology which
lead to data corruption (similar in concept to read-disturb errors in flash -
although completely different physically). It's necessary to fix these problems
to enable
reliable data storage.
The paper describes the proposed solution and also compares MRAM's
data density to other semiconductor memory technologies, including SRAM,
DRAM and
flash.
91% of Compellent's Customers Want to Evaluate SSDs
Editor:-
June 17, 2009 - Compellent
today announced results generated through attendee polling conducted at its
annual customer conference.
91%
of business partners and 78% of customers responded important, very
important or critical when asked, "What is your level of interest in
evaluating SSDs in your
environment?"
NextIO Unveils PCIe flash SSD
Editor:- June 17, 2009
- NextIO today
announced
it will demonstrate a 12 slot
PCIe flash SSD system,
designed in collaboration with
Marvell later
this month.
Each slot will be capable of over 200,000 IOPs and offer
400GB capacity.
Editor's comments:- there are nearly as many
companies making PCIe SSDs
today - as there are making 2.5"
SSDs. And it wouldn't surprise me to see the PCIe SSD oem count to become
the larger of the two.
With the growing number of
SSD controller and IP
companies in the market it's getting
easier to design
SSDs.
An electronics college graduate could probably build a
passable demonstration product as a summer project. But it's another matter
entirely - how well such a college demo unit would work in a variety of
applications and OS platforms. There's no shortcut to market experience. Users
will have to judge how much it's worth becoming beta sites for the mass of new
SSD companies flooding into the market.
NextIO is better
funded than most
students. The most recent
$15
million funding round announced earlier this month took their total to
over $55 million.
Avnet to Distribute WEDC
Editor:- June 17, 2009 -
Avnet has
become
a distributor for White
Electronic Designs
"WEDC products offer
defense and aerospace
customers unique package solutions with extended environmental performance,"
said Bryan Brady, vp of defense/aerospace for Avnet Electronics Marketing
Americas. "This strengthens our ability to offer distinct product size,
weight and performance advantages for
high reliability
applications."
WD Ships SiliconDrive III
Editor:- June 16, 2009 -
Western Digital
Solid State Storage announced that it has begun shipping its new
SiliconDrive III
SSD product family which includes 2.5" SATA and PATA and 1.8" Micro
SATA products with target read speeds up to 100MB/s and write speeds to 80MB/s
in capacities up to 120 GB.
"SiliconDrive III is the first example of how WD plans to
productize solid state technology developed by SiliconSystems. The launch of
SiliconDrive III will also enable WD to leverage its global sales and
distribution channels to accelerate the adoption of SSD technology beyond
SiliconSystems' traditional embedded systems OEM customer base into data
streaming applications such as multimedia content delivery systems and data
center media appliances," said Michael Hajeck, senior VP and GM of WD's
solid state storage business unit. "SiliconDrive III is an ideal solution
for OEMs that require increased performance, capacity,
reliability and
data throughput in their applications."
Editor's comments:-
some oems in the small form factor flash SSD market have earned a bad
reputation due to shipping sexy sounding products in volume before the
design and qualification process was adequately completed.
In contrast
- SiliconSystems' SiliconDrives were never the fastest products in their class -
but due to the background of its founders - the company's prime concern was to
design SSDs that were reliable and stayed reliable. When WD looked at the
spectrum of SSD technologies to acquire - an important consideration was this
proven reliability - established in millions of products over many years.
Of
all the SSD parameters to tweak - the easiest one is to make a product faster.
But. as many other HDD and SSD companies have learned you can't quickly fix
a reputation for flaky products.
DataSlide Says Revolutionary HD is Closer
Editor:-
June 15, 2009 - Dataslide
announced it was close to
productizing
its revolutionary hard drive technology.
DataSlide says it leverages
LCD and HDD processes to create an ultra thin massive
2D head array which
enables symmetric read and write performance of 160,000 random IOPS with
transfer rate of 500MB/s.
"DataSlide's Massively Parallel
architecture with 64 heads per surface could saturate a 32 lane
PCIe bus," said
Charles Barnes, CEO of DataSlide. "The Hard Rectangular Drive has the
industry reliability and cost advantages of
Hard Disk Drives with
superior performance and lower power then
Solid State Drives. The HRD
is over 60% lower power then HDD and during idle the media has zero power
dissipation making it the GREEN storage winner."
Editor's comments:- This journey started 7 years ago - and
there are still many marketing hurdles to cross before you can expect to click
and add such drives into your shopping basket.
Dataslide made its début
in the pages of StorageSearch.com in 2002 - when it announced it had
filed patents for a
revolutionary design of hard drive.
In 2004 - Dataslide
announced it had demonstrated
a prototype (under NDA) with the equivalent of 72,000 virtual RPM and the
potential to reach the mechanical equivalent of 12 million RPM.
Is
there a place today for such a new technology in the enterprise storage space?
Most hard disk makers have now accepted that SSDs will provide the
performance part of heavy transactional loads - while HDDs provide economies of
scale for massive content. Meanwhile - within the SSD space - there are many
new technology pretenders promising to claim flash's throne at some time in
the future. Until more is revealed publicly about capacity and price - the
competitiveness of Dataslide's technology can't be judged. And even if that
looks promising reliability
remains a key question for any new storage technology.
See also:-
How will hard
drives fare in an SSD world?
Notebook SSD Market Overview - is not pretty
Editor:-
June 15, 2009 - StorageSearch.com
published a new article today called -
Overview of
the Notebook SSD Market.
There's a simple way to summarize
the complex view of the SSD Notebook / Netbook market.
Lots of
initial hype and optimism that the market would deliver an astonishingly
new product experience to users, followed by dismay and disillusion due to
a flurry of poorly conceived, badly designed and ineptly executed products.
...read the
article
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