the SSD Buyers Guide - click to see article
SSD buyers guide
flash SSD Jargon
flash SSD Jargon
SSD clairvoyants ..

storagesearch.com

by Zsolt Kerekes, editor - February 2007

storage search
11 years - "leading the way to the new storage frontier"

high reliability flash SSDs  for embedded and high reliability servers
click here to see 100 more SSD articles





1.0" SSDs
1.8" SSDs
2.5" SSDs
3.5" SSDs
the Fastest SSDs
Flash - based Solid State Disks
RAM - based Solid State Disks
How Solid is Hard Disk's Future?
the Solid State Disks Buyers Guide
What's an SSD? / SSD Market History
the Flash SSD Performance Roadmap
the Top 10 Solid State Disk Companies
Why Seagate will Fail the SSD Challenge
Hybrid Drives - winners, losers & maybes
Calling for an End to Unrealistic SSD vs HDD IOPS Comparisons


announcing flash SSD storage with 10x to 30x the performance of 15K RPM hard drives
EasyCo claims 300,000 RPM
equivalent performance for
flash SSDs using their MFT
technology.

The tombstome sends a clear
message, although I think that
cost rather than performance will
continue the demand for HDDs in
many applications long after 2007.


Z's Laws - Predicting Future Flash SSD Performance
A few months ago a reader asked me a very good question.

"Is there an industry roadmap for future flash SSD performance?"

That prompted other questions like...
  • How fast are flash SSDs going to be in 2009?, 2010? or 2012?
  • What are the technology factors which relate to flash SSD throughput and IOPS?
  • How close will flash SSDs get to RAM SSD performance?
There wasn't a simple answer I could give at the time. Clues lay scattered all across this web site and in my many one on one discussions with readers about the market...
But I agreed there should be a single place on the web where these answers could be found.

Forget Moore's Law. That gives you the wrong answer, and this article explains why. ...read the article

Will there ever be 20,000 RPM HDDs?

Pre-announcing the extinction of the high speed enterprise hard drive.

or - why zero RPM disks will beat 20K RPM hard disks in the high RPM data center.

Sometimes making a projection from past trends gives you the wrong answer.

Number series play their part in this deception because we can sometimes see a pattern in numbers which falsely predicts what will come next.

Here's an example:- 1, 2, 4, 6, ...what comes next?

There are many ways you can continue this series. And you may be thinking - "8".

But that's not my answer.

The example I had in mind was the historic development of the horse drawn stage-coach. And the series of numbers - 1, 2, 4, 6, .. is the number of horses which pulled your carraige.

As people became wealthier and demanded more comfort in their road transport - a "coach and 6" became a luxurious form of high speed travel which gave its name to many English pubs. As we know from our current vantage point - high speed road travel did not advance to the "coach and 12" but instead took a detour via the internal combustion engine and the motor car.

Here's another example:- 3,000, 4,200, 5,400, 7,200, 10,000, 15,000, ??

Most of you will easily recognise that adding the addendum "RPM - Revolutions Per Minute" to this sequence charts the increase in hard disk drive rotation speeds during the past 20 years.

Where is this going?

Well you may be sorely tempted to add a number like 20,000 to the end of this sequence. That would be a not unreasonable assumption. And I might have been tempted to do the same myself but a number of signals have steered me in a different direction.

A white paper by Fujitsu Trends in Enterprise Hard Disk Drives contains this observation "Ultrahigh-speed HDDs rotating at speeds exceeding 20 000 rpm have also been researched but not commercialized due to heat generation, power consumption, noise, vibration and other problems in characteristics, and a lack of long term reliability." (See also Squeak! - Green Storage )

Independent market research suggests that high end servers will standardise on on the 2.5 inch (and smaller) form factor - because this is easier to deploy in blade servers and high density server farms. And a recent report by IDC said that the fastest growing segment in the high end server market was servers from Sun which pack in more processors per U(nit) of rack space than competitors - and at a lower wattage per server than other vendors.

Combining these trends together suggests that what customers of big multi user servers would really like is faster disk drives - with lower power consumption. But that's just not possible with hard disk technology.

Enter the solid state disk. SSDs in the same form factor as 15K RPM hard drives are available in the same capacity and typically offer faster throughput and hundreds of times faster random IOPs - which is a better measure of how disk speed translates to server speed in most multi-user systems. (The exceptions are storage servers which have been optimised to deliver streaming video - in which the performance gap is much smaller.) The SSDs also use less power and are more reliable.

But it is a truth universally acknowledged that a 146GB 15K RPM drive from Seagate today costs an order of magnitude less than a similar form factor (but faster) SATA SSD with similar capacity from vendors listed in our Solid State Disks Buyers Guide.

That's where Microsoft's Vista and the new generation of hybrid flash-hard drives give us the vital clue about what is going to happen next.

True - this technology was originally designed for notebooks. But if the OS can recognize a solid state disk and cache frequently used files to the flash part of it - then migrating this clever OS to a server version is not a very big step. And fast SSDs are already available.

Now - whether the hard disk oems get around to designing high speed bybrid disks - or whether systems integrators find a quick and dirty solution - such as stuffing 1 SSD for every 4 HDDs in the same box first remains to be seen. The latter - SSD HDD hybrid array solution - works in a server rack environment - and makes hybrid server disks extinct before they even appear in a Powerpoint product marketing plan. Sorry guys.

But here's a warning. If you do ever see a 20K RPM hard disk appear in a press release or catalog then give it a wide berth - unless you work for a computer museum. That's not the way the market will go.

See also:-

After SSDs... What Next?
Will Hard Disks Get Faster?
2009 - Year of SSD Market Confusion
SSD Myths and Legends - "write endurance"
War of the Disks: Hard Disk Drives vs. Flash SSDs
Sanitization Methods for Cleaning Up Hard Disk Drives
Calling for an End to Unrealistic SSD vs HDD IOPS Comparisons

.....................................................................

...Later:-

in August 2007 - confirming one of the forecasts made in this article...

EasyCo launched its "Managed Flash Technology" a storage system which includes a RAID-5 array of flash SSDs with a patent pending drive management layer which results in system write performance that is 100x faster than the bare solid state flash drive.

In the launch press release - MFT was bubbed "The 300,000 RPM Disk Drive".


in June 2008 - replying to a post in Gizmodo.com about rumors WD is working on a 20K rpm drive - their readers had some amusing and well informed comments.


in November 2008 - SanDisk proposed Virtual RPM as an alternative way of expressing R/W IOPS in flash SSDs.

.....................................................................

see also editor mentions for -

4,200 RPM HDDs
5,400 RPM HDDs
7,200 RPM HDDs
10,000 RPM HDDs
15,000 RPM HDDs

storage search banner

STORAGEsearch storage manufacturers news Squeak! - the Solid State Disks Buyers Guide Acquired companies Solid state disks
STORAGEsearch is published by ACSL