| see also:-
WD
Solid State Storage - editor mentions on StorageSearch.com
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WD's SSD business is founded on
SiliconSystems -
which entered the SSD market in
2004.
In
May 2008 - California based
SiliconSystems
opened its first office in the People's Republic of China. And its founder and
CEO, Michael Hajeck, was selected as a regional finalist for the Ernst &
Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award for the 2nd consecutive year.
In
August 2008 - SiliconSystems doubled the capacity of its miniature
embedded USB SiliconDrives.
In September 2008 - SiliconSystems announced faster versions
of its 2.5" SATA
/ PATA SiliconDrives -
with upto 50MB/s read / write speeds and the company became a founding member of
the
SNIA's Solid State
Storage Initiative.
In October 2008 -
SiliconSystems
contributed its SiliconDrive II Blade specification to the
Small Form Factor Special Interest Group for
the purpose of creating an official governing standard.
In December
2008 - SiliconSystems published a significant whitepaper -
NAND
Evolution and its Effects on SSD Useable Life (pdf). Starting with a tour
of the state of the art in the flash SSD market the paper introduces several
new concepts (including write amplification and wear leveling efficiency) to
help systems designers understand why current wear usage models don't give a
complete picture.
In -
January 2009 - SiliconSystems announced that its
SiliconDrive Blade
has been selected as a "2008 Best
Electronic Design" technology of the year winner in the embedded small
form factor category. The awards are chosen by the editorial staff of
Electronic Design magazine from
announcements they have received during the year. Editor
Bill Wong
cited SiliconDrive Blade's innovative design as a necessary development in
accelerating wide-spread adoption of
SSDs in embedded systems.
In March 2009 - SiliconSystems' VP of Product Planning, Gary
Drossel - shared his
SSD Bookmarks
with readers of
StorageSearch.com. And the
company also announced it has shipped over 4 million SiliconDrives
integrated with its
SiSMART
technology. SiliconSystems also said it will ship faster versions of its 2.5"
and 1.8" SiliconDrives in the next quarter - with R/W speeds up to 100MB/s
and 80MB/s respectively, and (SLC) capacity upto 128GB.
Also in
March 2009 - Western
Digital entered the SSD market by acquiring
SiliconSystems
for $65 million. Integration into WD begins immediately, with SiliconSystems now
becoming known as the WD Solid-State Storage business unit, complementing WD's
existing Branded Products, Client Storage, Consumer Storage and Enterprise
Storage business units. WD has published a
FAQs page about
this acquisition.
From the time when SiliconSystems first appeared on
our SSD pages in 2004 it was clear that the company was talking in a different
way to the rest of the market. Of the 4 main market segments which I identified
for
SSD market
penetration (published 2005) - I mentioned SiliconSystems as the pioneer in
"High Reliability DAS".
Quoting from that article - "The
customer value proposition of the High Reliability DAS SSD is that the interval
between server failures will be extended by several years compared to HDD
technology."
In recent years the company has avoided being sucked
along the alternative currents of the small form factor SSD market and stuck to
its mission of designing SSDs which are sustainable for customers to own - as
reliable
replacements for hard
drives. The company's acquisition by WD demonstrates that those principles
are valued where it counts - in the eyes of the world's fastest growing hard
disk maker.
In June 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.
In March 2010 -
WD Solid State
Storage began shipping a new range of
2.5" 128GB
SATA
SLC
SSDs - for
high reliability
24/7 embedded markets - called the
WD
SiliconDrive N1x. R/W speeds are upto 240MB/s and 140MB/s respectively.
Write endurance
is quoted as 701GB/Day - compatible with 5 year limited warranty. And
data integrity
(non-recoverable error rate) is better than 1 in 1015 bits read.
Also
in March 2010 - the company was featured in a character role in a
futurological article
- SSDs - reaching for
the Petabyte.
In March 2011 -
WD announced it
will acquire Hitachi GST
for approximately $4.3 billion. Although the primary motive is
hard drives - the
companies said they would put more resources into SSDs too. |
|
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| "The EU regulator
said a decision will be made before December. So the industry has to continue
waiting to see how WD will leverage the wider enterprise SSD footprint
it will get from integrating products and interface technologies from Hitachi
GST..." |
| ...Editor:- from the
new edition of
the Top SSD Companies. | | |
| .... |
| Can you believe the
word "reliability" in an SSD ad? |
Editor:-
Reliability is an
important factor in many applications which use
SSDs.... but can you trust
an SSD brand just because it claims to be reliable?
As we've seen in
recent years - in the rush for the
SSD market bubble -
many design teams which previously had little or no experience of SSDs were
tasked with designing such products - and the result has been successive waves
of flaky SSDs and
SSDs whose specifications
couldn't be relied on to remain stable and in many products quickly
degraded in customer sites. |
 |
As part of an education
series for SSD product marketers - this case study describes how one company -
which didn't have the conventional background to start off with - managed to
equate their brand of SSD with reliability in the minds of designers in the
embedded systems market. ...read the article | | | |
| . |
| Surviving SSD
sudden power loss |
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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| . |
| sugaring MLC for the
enterprise |
When flash SSDs started to be used as
enterprise server accelerators in 2004 - competing
RAM SSD makers said
flash wasn't reliable
enough.
RAM SSDs had been used for server speedups
since 1976
- and in 2004 they owned the enterprise market. (Before 2004 - flash SSDs
weren't fast enough and had mostly been used as rugged storage in the
military and
industrial
markets - and in space
constrained civilian products such as smartphones.)
By 2007 it was
clear that the endurance
of SLC flash was more than good enough to survive in high
IOPS server
caches. And in the ensuing years the debate about enterprise flash SSDs shifted
to MLC - because when systems integrators put early cheap consumer grade SSDs
into arrays - guess what happened? They burned out within a few months - exactly
as predicted.
Since 2009 new
controller
technologies and the combined market experience of enterprise MLC pioneers
like Fusion-io and
SandForce have
demonstrated that with the right management - MLC can survive in most (but
still not all) fast SSDs.
Now as we head into 1X nanometer flash
generations new technical challenges are arising and MLC SSD makers disagree
about which is the best way to implement enterprise MLC SSDs.
Which
type of so called "enterprise MLC" is best? Can you believe the
contradictory marketing claims? Can you even understand the arguments? (Probably
not.)
And that's why marketing is going to play a bigger part in the
next round of enterprise SSD wars as SSD companies wave their wands and reveal
more about the magic inside their SSD engines to audiences who don't really
understand half of what they're being told. |
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