| Time-frame |
most popular featured product |
editor's commentary |
| January 2009 to October 2009 |
|
In
April 2009 - Fusion-io
was named the #1 company in StorageSearch.com's
list of the the Top 10
SSD OEMs based on search volume in Q1 2009.
Fusion-io has
established for itself the brand recognition of being the SSD company most
strongly associated in customer minds with the PCIe form factor - despite the
fact that it wasn't the 1st company to launch such a product - and also despite
the number and quality of competitors in this segment.
StorageSearch.com
attributes the success of Fusion-io in establishing this early market
recognition to the company's single minded focus on evangelizing PCIe as the
next generation enterprise SSD form factor. That's unlike most SSD companies
whose marketing and technical efforts have been spread thin across multiple
fronts. |
| October 2008 to December 2008 |
|
In August 2007 -
Violin Memory launched
world's fastest 2U SSD.
This was the 1st time that a
PCIe connected
rackmount SSD
had been featured on StorageSearch.com. Earlier SSDs with a claim to ultra
speed fame had included FC,
SAS or
InfiniBand
interfaces.
There were 2 things which stood out when this product was
launched.
1 - the high density (compared to other
RAM SSD products), and
2 - Violin's promise to follow up with a later flash SSD model with
the same interface and form factor. That promise was made good in November 2008
- when the company announced a 4TB SLC flash 2U model with over 200K random Read
IOPS and 100K random Write IOPS (4K blocks). |
| . |
 |
| November 2007 to September
2008 |
|
In the period 2007 to 2008 -
2.5" SSDs created
a stir in the market by offering performance faster than the fastest
hard drives at prices
that were a low multiple of the equivalent HDD storage capacity (instead of
being justified by server replacements as described in the SSD CPU equivalency
segment of the SSD
market adoption model).
Although the fastest 2.5" and 3.5"
SSDs changed many times during that period - it was interesting to see that
products from 2 companies - Mtron
and then Memoright
captured the interest of our readers.
During this period there were
other faster products being shipped by other companies. For example 3.5"
FC SSDs from
TiGi and
Curtis were
significantly faster - but also cost considerably more - and had lower
capacity because they were RAM
SSDs - and not flash
SSDs. This demonstrates that value for money and suitability for new
applications were material factors for raising products into the top of the
popularity stats.
These products, shown on the left, signaled
important changes in the SSD market.
Mtron was based in Korea - and
its first products demolished the myth of US technology leadership in this form
factor.
Later, Memoright, based in China took over the leadership
mantle for several quarters with a product line which performed better in many
real-life benchmarks than more expensive products which had higher published
specifications. These differences proved to be based on internal architecture
(including a super capacitor powered RAM cache.)
Users learned that
they had to probe deep inside
SSD controllers to
create realistic performance models for small form factor SSDs because they
couldn't trust magazine
published benchmarks - even when they related to products from the world's
biggest semiconductor company. |
| August 2007 to October 2007 |
|
| April 2007 to July 2007 |
|
For several quarters, this product from
Adtron was the highest
capacity 2.5" flash SSD available.
It also had high perfomance -
65MB/s sustained write. |
