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2.5 inch SSDs

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click for more info - the fastest - 2.5" SATA flash SSD
Platinum M-Cell SSD
the fastest - 2.5" SATA flash SSD
from DTS
SSD Bookmarks
the SSD Buyers Guide
flash SSD Jargon Explained
the Top 10 SSD Companies
Can you trust your flash SSD specs?
Predicting Future Flash SSD Performance
SSD Myths and Legends - "write endurance"
Are MLC SSDs Ever Safe in Enterprise Apps?
the Most Popular Products on StorageSearch.com
Z's Laws - Predicting Future Flash SSD Performance
all SSDs / Flash SSDs / RAM SSDs / Hybrid Drives / hard drives
After SSDs... What Next? - the next "big thing" in storage will be...
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Editor's intro:- The 2.5 inch form factor is the hottest part of the solid state disk market - with new oems entering the market every month during the past year. At stake are multibillion dollar market segments for 3 of the 4 primary applications described in detail in our SSD Market Adoption Model. These will add up to a $10 billion / year SSD market within a few years.

The 2.5" form factor is the only size which straddles the wide range of SSD application slots.

The technical characteristics of the ideal 2.5" SSD product varies considerably from design slot to design slot (sometimes raw speed, othertimes capacity, reliability, TCO, initial price or power consumption and even weight). These are often conflicting parameters and cannot be met by any single product. However, the overlap of capability and technology between some high volume applications and the sheer number of oems guarantees a very competitive market - a from which users will benefit much sooner than predicted by out of date graph theory projections proposed by classical storage analysts.

Fastest / Highest Capacity 2.5" SSDs? - April 20, 2009

The fastest 2.5" SSD is the SATA compatible SF-1000 developer's kit made by SandForce. Throughput is 250MB/s sustained R/W. IOPS is 30,000 read or write. It has symmetric R/W performance - like a RAM SSD.

The highest capacity 2.5" SSD is 1TB - from pureSilicon.
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Trident SSDs
advanced rugged solid state drives
from Trident Space & Defense
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For other form factors see the listings in the Solid State Disks Buyers Guide
2.5" SSD news - selected from all SSD news.........................................
Cheetah Joins Fastest SSD List

Editor:- July 2, 2009 - Foremay has recently announced one of the fastest 2.5" SLC flash SSDs in the market.

The SATA compatible SC199 Cheetah V-Series has sustained R/W speeds of 260MB/s and /250MB/s respectively and 42,000 random IOPS. Capacity options range from 32GB to 256GB.


Crossing the T's in STEC's SWOT

Editor:- June 23, 2009 - an article published yesterday in EnterpriseStorageForum.com poses the question - Can SSD Maker STEC Be Stopped?

As far as it goes - it makes some good points. But if you're going to publish a SWOT analysis for STEC (or indeed any other SSD company) you need a far deeper understanding of the currents swirling around in the SSD market.

Because STEC's future success seems to be tied heavily to oems who use its products in the server acceleration market, the main factors which threaten that success are - in my view - the following:-
  • PCI express SSD market.

    While it's not intuitively obvious that PCIe SSDs compete head to head with 2.5" SSDs - the reality is they do. The growing search volume for PCIe SSDs - which StorageSearch.com has been tracking in the past year indicates that PCIe SSDs will be the main factor which limits the size and acceptance of DAS connected small form factor SSDs in the server box.
  • Outside the server box - in the rackmount SSD space - the market has moved beyond the traditional RAM versus Flash SSDs debate.

    The new debate here is how the market will split between the 2 main options:-
    .
    • proprietary flash SSDs (such as those made by Texas Memory Systems, and Violin Memory).
      .
    • arrays of Commercial Off The Shelf flash SSDs - such as those marketed by EMC and Sun Microsystems (who both oem STEC's SSDs). But another scope for fragmentation within the COTS space itself is the appearance of rackmount SSD arrays populated by COTS PCIe SSDs such as Dolphin and NextIO.

    As I have discussed in previous articles - I expect all these various architectural forms to grow and prosper - rather than for any clear winners to emerge in the near future. That's because users have widely different profiles with respect to performance needs and risk tolerance - which no single technology or vendor fits most economically.
  • Inside the 2.5" SSD market itself - there are many emerging point products which can threaten STEC from a performance point of view.

    Instead I think the biggest 2.5" SSD threat comes from STEC's customers designing their own SSDs (if they perceive that the small form factor SSD is indeed the way they want to go). With more than 20 chip companies offering the bits and pieces needed to design SSDs - and with the option of mixing and matching acquisitions with internal and external technology it's getting easier. The advantage to big server oems doing this - is that they can tailor products which meet their exact needs - and add unique features which can't be easily copied by their systems competitors. That's a much bigger threat to STEC than its customers than them buying SSDs from companies using SandForce's controller (which was mentioned in the ESF article).
To keep this analysis short - I haven't gone into internal business factors such as cash flow, logistics and supply chains. Any of these coming under stress could impact STEC's ability to service increasing demands from its customers (even without the external competitive therats listed above.) As you can see - the picture and outlook for STEC (or any other SSD company) is far from clear and certain. The market will decide - once it has absorbed and processed the confusing range of SSD choices on offer.

One useful way to see which SSD companies are getting more interest or less interest from customers in the market is to analyze changes in the quarterly top 10 SSD companies published by StorageSearch.com. The next edition will be published July 7.


WD Ships SiliconDrive III

Editor:- June 16, 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.

"SiliconDrive III is the first example of how WD plans to productize solid state technology developed by SiliconSystems. The launch of SiliconDrive III will also enable WD to leverage its global sales and distribution channels to accelerate the adoption of SSD technology beyond SiliconSystems' traditional embedded systems OEM customer base into data streaming applications such as multimedia content delivery systems and data center media appliances," said Michael Hajeck, senior VP and GM of WD's solid state storage business unit. "SiliconDrive III is an ideal solution for OEMs that require increased performance, capacity, reliability and data throughput in their applications."

Editor's comments:- some oems in the small form factor flash SSD market have earned a bad reputation due to shipping sexy sounding products in volume before the design and qualification process was adequately completed.

In contrast - SiliconSystems' SiliconDrives were never the fastest products in their class - but due to the background of its founders - the company's prime concern was to design SSDs that were reliable and stayed reliable. When WD looked at the spectrum of SSD technologies to acquire - an important consideration was this proven reliability - established in millions of products over many years.

Of all the SSD parameters to tweak - the easiest one is to make a product faster. But. as many other HDD and SSD companies have learned you can't quickly fix a reputation for flaky products.


Notebook SSD Market Overview - is not pretty

Editor:- June 15, 2009 - StorageSearch.com published a new article today called - Overview of the Notebook SSD Market.

There's a simple way to summarize the complex view of the SSD Notebook / Netbook market. Lots of initial hype and optimism that the market would deliver an astonishingly new product experience to users, followed by dismay and disillusion due to a flurry of poorly conceived, badly designed and ineptly executed products. ...read the article


Fastest 2.5" SSD Coming Soon

Editor:- June 12, 2009 - DTS today confirmed it has won a best of show award at Interop Tokyo 2009 for its Platinum SSD.

Editor's comments:- DTS's original Platinum drive was a 3.5" hybrid - which included a RAM SSD accelerated hard drive. The internal SSD controller virtualized the interface to make it appear as an OS agnostic SATA drive.

More recent versions of this drive embed a flash SSD (instead of HDD). The best way to think about this product is as a scaled down single disk version of an SSD accelerated RAID. It can significantly increase random IOPS for some types of application - at a cost which nothing else comes close to (using SLC flash technology). It's scalable too. Some DTS customers use these drives in rackmount arrays.

This is the kind of product which requires extensive benchmarking in the production environment in which it's going to be used. If it's a good fit - then great. But actual speedup and competitiveness depends on a variety of factors which are too difficult for most users to model. DTS says it will ship a 2.5" SSD which delivers about 40,000 IOPS later this month.


the Most Popular Storage Products

Editor:- June 8, 2009 - StorageSearch.com today published a new article - the Most Popular Products on StorageSearch.com (2007 to 2009)

What can we learn about changes in the storage market and the changing interests of readers by looking at how the most popular storage products viewed by our readers have changed in recent years?

The log files revealed some trends which seem obvious now - but which I hadn't consciously noticed before. ...read the article


SSD Article Pageviews Grow 98%

Editor:- June 1, 2009 - StorageSearch.com disclosed today that page views for the popular SSD Buyers Guide increased 65% in May 2009 compared to the year ago period.

Average page views of the top 5 SSD articles in May 2009 were 98% higher than the top 5 SSD articles a year ago.

The #1 incoming search word to the mouse site was "SSD" which occurred 2.4x as often as a year ago. These metrics indicate continued growth in reader activity related to the SSD market despite the recession.

"Nearly every IT publication now has something to say about SSDs" says StorageSearch.com's editor, Zsolt Kerekes. "The SSD content explosion includes a lot of froth and inaccurate analysis - but also a lot of good stuff too. The best of the these get honorable mentions in the SSD Bookmarks. It's nice to know that despite the intense competition for SSD readers - we're still maintaining nearly triple digit percentage growth. Thanks to all our readers and those who link here for helping to make this happen. There's no shortage of ideas for new original SSD articles. In the past year nearly 1 in 3 new articles got abandoned mid way through editing because something more significant swept them away."


OCZ Raises Performance Summit for its 2.5" Consumer SSDs

Editor:- May 19, 2009 - OCZ today launched its fastest 2.5" consumer SATA SSDs - the Summit Series - with 200MB/s sustained write and 250GB capacity.

Although not the fastest SSDs in the industry, they are more than 2x as fast as OCZ's Core series launched in July 2008.


Super Talent Refreshes Tired Flash SSDs

Editor:- May 15, 2009 - Super Talent today announced new firmware for its UltraDrive ME series 2.5" SSDs.

This includes what the company calls a "Performance Refresh Tool" to fix performance degradation problems in its earlier generation of SSDs.

Although some commentators on the web have attributed such problems to fragmentation - that's completely incorrect!

Since the access time for random reads in a well designed SSD is nearly identical for all locations - the real problem in Super Talent's SSDs (and some models from Intel) was due tobadly designed products which were rushed to market too soon without adequate testing. For a deeper look at these issues see Can you trust flash SSD specs & benchmarks? - published nearly a year ago - which first alerted buyers to these problems. See also:- SSD controllers and IP.


Toshiba Takes the High Ground in Notebook SSD Wars

Editor:- May 14, 2009 - Toshiba announced today it is offering 512GB SSDs as an option in notebooks for the Japanese market.

The new, Toshiba-developed 512GB SSD employs a 2-bit-per-cell MLC flash memory - which gives 4x the capacity of SLC flash used in industrial and enterprise SSDs for the same silicon wafer footprint.

One of the failures of the SSD market in 2008 was the low performance of SSDs integrated in notebooks. Toshiba's new notebook seems to address that market failure . The company says its new SSD controller boosts data throughput figures of 230MB/s reads and 180MB/s writes.


TDK Unveils 2.5" Industrial SSDs

Editor:- May 12, 2009 - TDK launched a range of 2.5" industrial temperature SATA SSDs (SLC and MLC) with upto 64GB capacity and R/W speeds of 95MB/s and 55MB/s respectively.

Other features include 15-bit/sector ECC, 128-bit AES encryption and SMART. The new SSDs include internal UPS and an auto-recovery function that automatically recovers data when read disturbance errors occur. The company also launched a range of 1.8" SSDs.


Patriot Memory Offers Consumers Faster 2.5" SSDs

Editor:- May 11, 2009 - Patriot Memory launched its Torqx line of SATA compatible 2.5" flash SSDs with 64GB, 128GB and 256GB capacities.

The new models include 64MB of DRAM cache and deliver upto up to 260MB/s read, 180MB/s write speeds. OS support includes:- WindowsXP, Vista, Linux, and Mac OS X.

"With SSD technologies becoming more 'mainstream' in the consumer market, Patriot's goal is to give their customers discretion across their purchasing preferences," said Meng J. Choo, Patriot's Flash Product Manager. "In these tough economic times, consumers are looking for options; our goal is to give them that opportunity to add new technology, and have no reservations about their decisions."
2.5 inch SSD OEMs Directory © STORAGEsearch.com
manufacturer interface(s)
AboUnion IDE / SATA
ACARD Technology SATA
A-DATA SATA / USB
Adtron IDE / SATA
Advanced Media / RITEK / Traxdata ATA / SATA
Apacer SATA
Afaya SATA
Altec ComputerSysteme IDE
APRO SATA
Barun Electronics SATA
BiTMICRO Networks ATA / SATA / SCSI
Cactus Technologies IDE
CoreSolidStorage IDE / SATA
DTS SATA
Foremay SATA / PATA
GalaxyStor IDE
G.Skill SATA
Hagiwara Sys-Com IDE / SATA
Hynix Semiconductor oems Mtron
IEI Technology IDE
Imation oems Mtron
InnoDisk SATA
Intel SATA
Kingston Technology rebrands Intel's fast SSDs
MemoCom PATA / SATA
Memoright IDE / SATA
Micron / Crucial SATA
Mtron PATA / SATA
Mushkin SATA / USB
Myung Information Technologies IDE / SATA
OCZ Technology Group SATA
Patriot Memory SATA
Phison Electronics SATA
PNY Technologies IDE / SATA
Pretec Electronics IDE
PQI IDE / SATA
pureSilicon SATA
RunCore IDE / SATA
Samsung Electronics PATA / SATA
SandForce SATA
SanDisk IDE / SATA
Sans Digital SATA - 2 x CF card to 2.5" converter
Sharkoon SATA - 6 x SDHC card to 2.5" converter
SiliconSystems PATA /SATA
SMART Modular Technologies PATA / SATA
Solidata SATA
Soliware SATA
STEC FC / PATA / SATA / SAS
Sun Microsystems SATA
Super Talent Technology SATA
Targa Systems Division SATA, SCSI / USB / GbE
TDK SATA
Team Group IDE
Toshiba SATA
Transcend Information IDE / SATA
Trident Space & Defense IDE / SATA
Unigen IDE
Walton Chaintech PATA / SATA / USB
Western Digital PATA /SATA
SiliconDrives from SiliconSystems
2.5" SiliconDrives
from Western Digital
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Targa Series 4 - 2.5 inch SCSI flash disk
2.5" Removable Military SSDs
from Targa Systems
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Adtron industrial grade  flash solid state disk
2.5" 128GB industrial PATA SLC flash SSDs
from Adtron
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Fusion-io fast SSDs - click for more info
world's fastest production PCIe SSD
from Fusion-io
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2.5"   flash SSDs  from Memoright
2.5" 128GB flash SSDs
120MB/sec sustained read/write
and 800 write IOPS - from Memoright
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the Fastest Solid State Disks

Speed isn't everything, and comes at a price.
But if you do need the speediest SSD then wading through the web sites of over 120 current SSD oems to find a suitable candidate slows you down.

And the SSD search problem will get even worse.
the Fastest Solid State Disks
I've done the research for you to save you time. And this page is updated daily from storage news and direct inputs from oems. ...read the article,
.
Z's Laws

Predicting Future Flash SSD Performance
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

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