| 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."
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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. |
 | |
| 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 | | | |
