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Introducing the Miniature Storage Drive Market

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The market for small form factor SSDs and HDDs (1.0" and smaller) has seen a lot of changes in suppliers, technology and applications in the past decade. Once the exclusive preserve of the military, spooks and space scientists this market is now dominated by the needs of shoppers for consumer lifestyle and entertainment gadgets.

Influential pioneers in this market shift were 3 companies:- M-Systems, Toshiba and Cornice.
  • M-Systems - developed the market concept of the DiskOnChip.

    In 2001 M-Systems' DiskOnChip flash SSD offered 16MB capacity in a single 48-pin TSOP (Thin Small Outline Package). By 2006, when the company was acquired by SanDisk, the DiskOnChip capacity had grown to gigabytes. The primary application at the time was mobile phone handsets.
  • Toshiba - showed a prototype 0.85" hard drive in January 2004.

    With 4GB capacity it was the world's physically smallest hard drive at the time. When launching the new form factor Toshiba said "the 0.85" HDD is expected to boost the functionality of a new generation of products, including mobile phones, digital audio players, PDAs, digital still cameras, camcorders and external storage devices."
  • Unlike the other 2 companies above which drifted in from the military or notebook markets - Cornice was a startup whose sole reason for existence for the small form factor consumer storage market.

    Cornice aspired to become the leading supplier of hard disks to the phone market, and various other markets like mobile music players and video cameras.

    Cornice's 2GB Storage Element appeared in some products shown at CES in 2004.

    In 2004 I said "Cornice's Storage Element does for disk drives what the original RISC concept did for CISC CPUs. It's like a Reduced Instruction Set hard drive which cuts out the unneeded Complexity."

    The product turned out to be risky in the conventional sense for the investors who had put $81 million into the company. A combination of patent lawsuits and market developments in flash SSDs put paid to their ambitions within a few years of launching their first product.
Since those early pioneering days in the miniature storage drive market the competition has got much tougher.

This is a market where potential unit shipments read like telephone numbers. One good reason (as you already know by now) is the potential to put small storage drives into cell phones to store music, pictures and video. Then you can add in the markets for PDAs, music players and digital cameras. Plus satellite navigators in cars, games, toys. When you've got a potential market size measured in billions of units - it seems needless to overburden the calculations by adding in more specialized embedded industrial products, or medical instrumentation, security systems etc.

You can get a better idea of the detail from looking at some of the news stories listed below.
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Small Form Factor SSDs etc Extracts from SSD History
SiliconSystems Opens Office in People’s Republic of China

ALISO VIEJO, Calif - May 6, 2008 - SiliconSystems, Inc. today announced that it has expanded its Asia-Pacific operations by establishing an office in Shanghai, the company’s first in the People’s Republic of China.

The new office will play a critical role in supporting the burgeoning demand for SiliconSystems’ industry-leading SiliconDrive technology in China and Taiwan. Yu Yuan Tang, a 21-year industry veteran, will head the new office. ...SiliconSystems profile


STEC Announces Fast 1" SSD

SANTA ANA, Calif - April 21, 2008 - STEC, Inc. announced the MACH4 - a 1" SATA / PATA SSD.

For a small drive - the MACH4 is fast:- with sustained sequential reads upto 90MB/s and writes upto 55MB/s. It's expected to be in mass production at the end of April in capacities up to 32GB. Projected OEM pricing for the 8GB capacity point is $45.

"For the numerous applications which were historically challenged by the severe limitations of 1 inch HDDs, STEC is now offering a much more cost-effective, higher capacity and higher reliability alternative..." said STEC's Patrick Wilkison. ...STEC profile


March 2008

Trident Space & Defense launched the BGADrive - an IDE compatible 32GB flash SSD in a 29mm x 29mm form factor module for embedded applications.

SiliconSystems Launches Postage Stamp Size USB SSD

Aliso Viejo, Calif - October 30, 2007 - SiliconSystems, Inc. today announced its new SiliconDrive USB Blade solid-state storage product.

SiliconDrive USB Blade is a postage-stamp sized USB solid-state drive designed for embedded storage applications where board space, shock, vibration, temperature and multi-year product lifecycles are mandatory design considerations.
click to see SiliconSystems company  profile
Evaluation units and host developer tool kits will be available in December in capacities of 512 megabytes, 1 and 2 gigabytes. ...SiliconSystems profile
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""He's probably just as scared of us"
said Megabyte, not very convincingly.
"Shut up! And keep peddling" said his niece.

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