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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
OCZ.
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. And
since the idea was first demonstrated in
2011 -
PCIe has been creeping
off cards and modules and into new models of
2.5" PCIe 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?
Because
it 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 16 companies
which have already exited the 2.5" SSD 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,
Biwin,
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,
Ramaxel Technology,
Renice Technology ,
ore,
Samsung,
SandForce,
SanDisk,
Sans Digital,
Seagate,
Sharkoon,
Silicon Power ,
SMART,
Solidata,
Soliware,
Sonnet Technologies,
Stealth.Com,
STEC,
Strontium,
Sun Microsystems,
Super Talent
Technology, Swissbit,
Targa Systems Division,
TCS,
TDK,
Team Group,
Toshiba,
Transcend Information,
Unigen,
Viking,
Walton Chaintech,
Western Digital,
Wintec |
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| Foremay ships 2TB 2.5"
SSDs |
Editor:- January 15, 2013 - Foremay today
announced
immediate availability of 2TB
industrial
2.5"
SATA SSDs with
standard 9.5mm thickness.
Editor's comments:- In its press
release for this product Foremay claims to be the first company to do this. But
this is one of those situations where I think being "first" tells us
more about market conditions (where things stand in the
HDD replacement
part of the SSD market) than about the technological supremacy - or
otherwise - of any particular SSD oem.
It's been technically feasible
to make 2TB 2.5" SATA SSDs for the past 2 years. The only reason you
haven't seen them flooding into the market is that such products would have been
unattractive before to both SSD oems and to SSD buyers.
For the SSD oem
- the same bunch of memory chips used to make a 2TB 2.5" SATA drive - have
been much more profitably deployed in faster SSD modules such as
PCIe SSDs or
SAS SSDs.
Meanwhile
for SSD buyers and specifiers - 2TB 2.5" SSDs would have been very
expensive -
compared to the alternatives - while delivering no performance benefits (due to
the slowness of the SATA interface) which means that 2x 1TB SATA drives are
faster in a storage system then 1x 2TB drive.
In today's market,
however, the cost differences between flash SSDs and hard drives have shrunk to
the extent that for industrial equipment designers who look at the cost of
reliability in a
7 year industrial product operating life timeframe - the alternative of using
1 factory fitted SSD compared to the probability of using 2-3 HDDs in the same
slot (taking into account the MTBF distribution over the system population)
makes high capacity SATA SSDs attractive.
This class of SSDs will
also extend the market life of equipment designs which originally used
HDD interface standards as a way of virtualizing and protecting against
generational changes in raw flash
memory - even if they never used hard drives. The extra storage capacity
enables equipment designers to integrate more features and software. | | |
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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" |
| Zsolt Kerekes,
editor StorageSearch.com | | |
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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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| 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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