WD acquires Hitachi GST
Editor:-
March 7, 2011 -
Western Digital
today announced it will acquire Hitachi GST in a cash
and stock transaction valued at approximately $4.3 billion.
The
resulting company will retain the Western Digital name and remain headquartered
in Irvine, California. John Coyne will remain CEO of WD, Tim Leyden
COO and Wolfgang Nickl CFO. Steve Milligan, president and CEO of
Hitachi GST, will join WD at closing as president, reporting to John Coyne.
Editor's comments:- This will confirm WD as the
world's
largest manufacturer of
hard drives (a position
it has been inching towards organically) and could also have a significant
impact on the company's SSD market presence too. The acquisition (expected to
close in the September quarter) shows a lot of confidence in the medium term
future of the hard disk market. Although hard drives are the primary
motivation for this acquisition - the result will also be a bigger player in
the emerging SSD market too.
WD has had good visibility into the SSD
market through its earlier acquired
SiliconDrives
business whch has been shipping SSDs since 2004. Hitachi GST has been a
laggard in the SSD market - with its most significant products still in the "coming
soon" / being qualified category.
In today's conference call
today we heard that both companies expect that hard drives will continue to
be the main devices which store high capacity digital content for the forseeable
future.
This view is completely compatible with my own previous
published predictions about SSD growth and SSD market penetration. The devil
is in the details - and the picture is complicated.
In my
SSD market
adoption model (published 2005) all 4 of the main application segments
for SSDs are unrelated to high capacity HDD replacement. We only get to that
point in 2016 when
I expect that a new class of bulk storage SSDs will have lower running costs
than high capacity HDDs in datacenter apps. And as I've said many times the
consumer entertainment market has different economics in which HDDs will stay
dominant.
In my 2007 article
How Solid is
Hard Disk's Future? I explained why the HDD market would continue to grow
and probably not peak until 2011. In that article I also gave a simple rule of
thumb - which was - "HDDs will survive in applications where the average
size of disk installed is an order of magnitude above the most commonly
available shipped SSD." What that means in today's market is that 250GB
SSDs can coexist in the same market as 3TB hard drives - because they don't
compete for the same application slots.
What about
hybrid SSD-HDD
drives in notebooks?
I've always said since the very first time the idea was mentioned on these pages
(April 2005) - I
think they won't provide a good sustainable solution and are a waste of space.
It doesn't stop manufacturers trying - but each new hybrid notebook SSD so far
has been the triumph of hope over experience.
Do I think SSDs will
eventually replace HDDs? Yes - no doubt about it. But there's a long way for
the hard drive market to run between now and the picture
I
describe in 2020 when - "the only spinning devices in the storage
cabinets will be the cooling fans".
the Top 30 SSD articles
Editor:- March 4, 2011 -
StorageSearch.com today
published -
the Top 30 SSD
articles - a new weekly updated list which includes summaries of the most
popular articles viewed by our readers.
No-one (apart from me) has got
time to read the thousands of SSD articles on this site.
A simple
list of popular SSD articlesused to appear from time to time in the
market research pages.
But the title of an article and its rank don't tell you enough about whether an
article will be worthwhile for you. An article which may suit a newcomer
to the market may have thousands of external links to it - wherease a newer one
further down the list - may be more beneficial to more experienced readers. So
I've written new summaries for each article to make it clearer what they
contain. ...see
the articles list
SSD Bookmarks - from Foremay's CTO and co-founder
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.
Performance vs data survivability in SSD accelerators
Editor:-
March 1, 2011 - a new blog -
Consistency
Groups: The Trouble with Stand-alone SSDs - by Woody Hutsell
- discusses different approaches to maintaining data in SSDs in the event of
an SSD failure.
Some configurations - while simple to implement - can
have a large negative impact on performance. ...read
the article
IBM expands Fusion-io options
Editor:- March 1, 2011
- IBM
has extended its qualified server support for SSD technology from Fusion-io according
to an
announcement
today.
Intel publishes new standard to increase efficiency of PCIe SSDs
Editor:-
March 1, 2011 - Intel
published version 1.0 of a new proprietary standard for designers of
PCIe SSDs in systems
which use Intel processors - the
NVM Express Optimized PCI
Express SSD Interface.
The interface efficiently supports
multi-core by ensuring thread(s) may run on each core with its own queue &
interrupt without any locks required. For enterprise class solutions, there is
support for end-to-end data protection, security & encryption capabilities,
as well as robust error reporting and management capabilities.
Intel
says that more than 70 companies have contributed to the standard - which will
make it easier to write software drivers which support multiple vendors. The
new standard will also make it easier for oems to adopt new SSD products from
alternative vendors which implement a consistent feature set.
See
also:- SSD design
efficiencies |
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| this way to the Petabyte
SSD |
In 2016 there will be
just 7 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. |
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... |
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. | | | |
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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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