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"It's over 10 years since
the first 2.5" SSDs came to market.
But the 2.5" SSD market still feels young, chaotic and bursting
with creative design energy" | | |
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Lots of companies design and sell 2.5"
SSDs
You can scroll down this page to see who they are below. So
where do you begin?
One simple way to divide the market is -
it's those with SandForce
controllers inside - and then everyone else.
But that would be too
simplistic.
what about speed?
OK another way is to
narrow things down is to look at speed.
If you need the
fastest SSDs in the
2.5" form factor - take a look at
STEC and
Pliant (now owned by
SanDisk).
what
about rugged?
Do you mean rugged
industrial or
rugged for true military
deployments with fast secure data purge?
what about a 2.5"
SSD for notebooks?
The
notebook SSD
market has got more size options than that.
what about a 2.5"
SSD with a particular interface?
Did you mean
PATA SSDs?
SATA SSDs?
SAS SSDs?
parallel SCSI SSDs?
(yup new designs are still available to plug into legacy hard disk slots) and
I almost forgot to mention them (because they are going out of fashion)
fibre-channel SSDs.
what
about that old SLC versus MLC thing?
It still matters
in some cases -
but not in all.
What about cheap? - who makes the cheapest
SSDs?
Here's an
article which shows how
prices have dropped in the past 10 years - and why I can't answer that
question. "SSD" is not enough enough information. What's in and what's
left out of the design - makes a big difference to the price. And you can't
trust consumer SSD
makers to make these decisions for you for a
variety of reasons.
who
are the top SSD companies which really matter?
I thought you were
never going to ask that. Here's what
millions of other SSD
readers think.
why does the SSD market look so complicated?
Becauseit
is complicated.
I've only been talking about 2.5" SSDs here.
If you include all the other sizes - I currently track over 300 SSD makers - and
that could rise to
over 1,000 in a
handful of years time...
It's all about the size of the market
opportunity and how
the market will grow in the future.
Leading
SSD companies genuinely
disagree about the best way to design SSDs and where to put them.
The
market will get more complicated before it gets any simpler.
For what's
happening now? - see SSD news.
For
how did we get here? - see
SSD history.
Here
are some more popular
articles about SSDs. |
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Partial list of 2.5" SSD makers
I've
called this a "partial list" because it excludes about 15 companies
which have already exited the 2.5" market.
And due to the
transient nature of the SSD
market bubble I haven't felt it worth my time to add every single company
which I know makes this size of SSD - especially if they aren't investing the
effort to say anything new or different which could interest readers.
AboUnion ,
ACARD Technology,
Active Media Products,
A-DATA,
Adaptec,
ADLINK Technology,
Advanced Media /
RITEK / Traxdata, Afaya,
Apacer,
Afaya,
Altec ,
AMP,
APRO,
ATP Electronics,
Barun Electronics,
BiTMICRO,
Buffalo Technology,
Cactus Technologies,
Corsair,
CoreSolidStorage,
DTS,
EDGE Tech,
Emphase,
Foremay,
Fortasa Memory Systems,
GalaxyStor,
G.Skill
, Hagiwara Sys-Com,
Hynix Semiconductor,
IEI Technology,
Imation,
InnoDisk,
Intel,
KingFast,
KingSpec,
Kingston Technology,
Lexar Media,
Lite-On ,
MagicRAM,
Macrotron Systems,
MemoCom,
Memoright,
Micron / Crucial,
Microsemi,
Mushkin,
Myung,
OWC,
OCZ,
Patriot Memory,
Phison Electronics,
PhotoFast,
Pliant Technology,
Plextor,
PNY,
PQI,
Pretec Electronics,
Princeton Technology,
pureSilicon,
Renice Technology ,
ore,
Samsung,
SandForce,
SanDisk,
Sans Digital,
Seagate,
Sharkoon,
Silicon Power ,
SMART,
Solidata,
Soliware,
Stealth.Com,
STEC,
Strontium,
Sun Microsystems,
Super Talent
Technology, Swissbit,
Targa Systems Division,
TDK,
Team Group,
Toshiba,
Transcend Information,
Trident Space &
Defense, Unigen,
Viking,
Walton Chaintech,
Western Digital,
Wintec |
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| "...the SSD market has
gate-crashed the server party - and the SSD roadmaps are changing too fast
for the old style computer vendors to keep up." |
| ...... from -
the new
business case for SSD ASAPs | | |
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| SSD Pricing -
where does all the money go? |
| SSDs are among the most
expensive (and complex) computer hardware products you will ever buy and
understanding the factors which determine SSD costs is often a confusing
and irritating process... ...which is not made any easier when market prices
for apparently identical capacity SSDs can vary more than 100x to 1!
|
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Why is that? There are
good reasons for these cost differences. But more expensive isn't always better
for you. To find out what goes into the price - and whether you need it - ...read the article | | | |
| . |
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| Imprinting the brain of
the SSD |
Editor:- how did the SSD
market ever change from:- Who cares? to You care! about the identity of
SSD controllers?
It all happened so quickly that we now assume it was always this way. |
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This MarketingViews case
study compares SandForce's SSD processor branding program with previous
examples in chip history and analyzes key business success factors. ...read the article | | | |
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| Can you believe the
word "reliability" in a 2.5" 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. |
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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 | | | |
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| Power, Speed and
Strength in SSD brands |
Does what marketers call
their SSDs impact who SSD buyers will call?
This article surveys
how vendors have played with awesome and mundane words to make their SSDs
sound better - with examples from across the whole spectrum of the SSD market
- the good, the bad and you know how this goes - because a
Clint Eastward
movie made 45 years ago is still better known than any SSD today. |
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And that's the challenge
which wannabe T-Rexes in the SSD market have to meet.
...read the
article | | | | |
