Metaphors in SSD brands
inanimate Power, Speed and Strength

• Achiever - is the name of an industrial SATA DOM SSD product range from Flexxon. The name suggests getting things done right.

• Aeon - is the name of a 3.5" RAM SSD concept touted in a blog by OCZ in 2013. "Aeon" means ages of time - and the implication here was it wouldn't wear out due to endurance and would last forever. But we haven't seen it yet.

• Alacritech - is the name of a company which makes SSD ASAPs. The name derives from the word "alacrity" - which means doing things fast in a positive, deft or pleasing way.

• ArmourDrive - from Greenliant Systems is the name of an mSATA SSD - in the JEDEC MO-300 form factor. Tara Yingst at Greenliant told me "the name highlights the SSDs added features - power interrupt data protection, user-configurable security zones, erase/purge commands - as well as the ability to operate at full industrial temperatures (-40C to +85C)."

• Cactus - is a tough plant which can thrive in the desert without any visibly apparent source of water. And - as I was surprised to learn from a vacation in Arizona - they can live a long time too. The big iconic saguaro cactuses which you see today standing like tree statues can be hundreds of years old. So you can see how that idea might work in the market today for an industrial SSD company - like Cactus Technologies. Having said that - the company's own history page tells a different story about the original roots of this company's name.

• Clipper - from Curtis - used the concept of the Clipper - a fast sailing ship - for its 5.25" RAM SSDs in the late 1990s and upto about 2002.

• DDRdrive - from DDRdrive - is the name for a family of PCIe RAM SSDs. "DDR" was earlier used in the industry for Double Data Rate RAM - and the memory industry progressed onto numbers - like DDR3 and DDR4 for succeeding faster generations. Therefore in a way DDRdrive suggests a faster drive and also tells you that it probably uses RAM. But - as discussed elsewhere - these SSD naming signals can sometimes be misleading.

• DuraClass - from SandForce - is the name given to the technological thinking in the company's SSD controllers - which enable consumer grade MLC flash to be used reliably in high performance SSDs. "Dura Class" suggests durability (related to flash endurance) and a class of products which is different to all the others out there. Can you think of any others? There are many - but as discussed in - Imprinting the brain of the SSD - most people would have difficulty naming them.

• DuraDrive - from Super Talent Technology - is a range of industrial SSDs which doesn't use DuraClass technology - although confusingly - another product range from Super Talent does.

• Excelero - is an SSD software company which emerged from stealth in 2017 with a solution which manages NVMe PCIe SSD fabrics with ultra low incremental latency added by the software stack. The pools of SSDs can be configured as a single large acceleration space.

• FerriSSD - from Silicon Motion - is a SATA / PATA SSD on a chip. Jonathan Bruce told me - the "Ferri" prefix means "strong or durable". In the datasheet (pdf) for this SSD (March 2014) I saw an SSD jargon term - I hadn't seen before - WAI - Write Amplification Index.

• Force - from Corsair - is a family of 2.5" SSDs which use SSD controllers designed by SandForce.

• Fortasa Memory Systems - is the name of an SSD company founded in 2009 which supplies rugged SSDs for the industrial and military markets.

• Fortissimo - from A3CUBE is the name given to the system software which underlies its PCIe connected shared reflective memory fabric.

• Full Metal Jacket? - yes that was the idea behind choosing the name of the company - said John Conklin co-founder of FMJ Storage - in reply to a question by the editor of StorageSearch.com - in March 2014. FMJ operates in the embedded industrial and military SSD markets.

• GigaExpress - from Fuji Xerox - was the name of a 1U rackmount PCIe SSD. "Giga Express" conveys the message "Very Fast" - and its 650MB/s was fast in 2006 when it was launched.

• HyperDrive - from Attorn - is the name for a PATA/ SATA RAM SSD. In English usage - Hyper - suggests an extreme state. In the computer market it was used in the early 1990s - as part of "HyperSPARC" - to name a 32 bit processor designed by Ross Technology. In my view 2 things which were never quite right in the market orientation of the HyperDrive were (1) - the original form factor was 5.25" - at a time when all other SSD and hard disk makers had stopped making this size and - (2) - the initial product had a PATA interface. Although it was faster than other PATA SSDs at the time - this narrowed down the market to poor consumers rather than rich enterprise users - who could afford an SSD - if it had an appropiately fast interface such as parallel SCSI or fibre-channel.

• Immortal - is the name of a military SSD series (2.5" NVMe U.2) with an integrated array of defense shield features - which was launched by Foremay in January 2018.

• IronKey - name of the company which in 2009 launched a brand of "most secure" USB flash drives.

• JetExpress - from OCZ is the name of an SSD controller platform for the consumer market.

• Jet.io - from Density Dynamics - is the name for its 3.5" RAM SSDs. Although jets are fast - the problem in metaphor naming land is that other related words may be faster. So is a "Jet" type of SSD faster or slower than a "Rocket" type of SSD for example?

• KingFast is the name of an SSD company founded in China. "King" implies the head or leader (except in a republic) and "Fast" is an obvious name to use in a brand. But when you start mixing personality brands with speed brands you run the risk of mental comparisons. So is a king more or less powerful than a god - (Zeus) for example? When you mix metaphors you don't always result in a combination which is stronger than the constituent parts. And this does come back to language and cultural expectations in the target market.

• Lightning - from Pliant Technology - is the name for its family of SAS SSDs. In common English parlance - "flash" and "lightning" often appear in the same phrase - therefore lightning doesn't sound strange when used for a flash SSD. "Quick as a flash of lightning" also sounds natural / unstrained. On the negative side - lightning strikes can kill people and electronic systems too. All words come with complex baggage and potentially different readings to the one which brand marketers had in mind.
  
  Lightning - strikes again - being the name of EMC's stealth mode (Jan 2012) PCIe SSD.

• MACH - from STEC - is based on the idea of high speed. Mach 1 - is the speed of sound. Mach 2 is twice as fast. STEC has used this naming concept for many generations of SSD products for example MACH4, MACH8 and MACH16. The company has also combined this with the suffix IOPS - in some products - for example MACH8IOPS.

• MagicRAM - is the name of a flash SSD company founded in 1990. Magic is a metaphor which may work well in other markets or at other times - but doesn't sound too good to me. I know we talk about software wizards and the black art of SSD performance tuning - but in the industrial SSD market where this company operates its customers probably prefer good old reliable technology engineering to mysterious sounding magic. Now it may be that its long established customers have got used to the name and they know what they can expect to get from this company. But in my view MagicRAM is a negative and weak name for an SSD company looking to attract new customers - and they probably have to work hard to overcome the inherent disadvantage of their brand.

• MaxIO is a brand name for fast enterprise SSDs from BiTMICRO first used in 2012 for PCIe SSDs and extended in 2015 to rackmount flash arrays.

• Nimble - is the first part of the name for Nimble Storage - a company which entered the SSD market in Q3 2010 - with an iSCSI compatible SSD accelerated backup compression and dedupe appliance.

• Nitro!FC - from Curtis - combined the explosive power of nitroglycerin - with the more prosaic FC abbreviation for fibre-channel. It was the original name for a 3.5" SSD - but the name was later changed to HyperXCLR . The word Hyper had also been used in the early 1990s in a related market as a brand of microprocessor - HyperSPARC.

• PowerArmor - from WD Solid State Storage - is the name given to the technologies which the company wraps around its SiliconDrive SLC SSD during power up, power down and line distrubances. WD says "75% of drive field failures are the result of power-related corruption. This means that brownouts, blackouts and even lightning strikes all contribute to the number #1 cause of RMAs among embedded systems storage."

• QikDRIVE - from Platypus Technology - used the phonetic qik to suggest a drive that was quick / fast.

• Quicksilver - is a brand of hybrid storage system from Panzura.

• RevoDrive - from OCZ - is a family of PCIe SSD accelerators. Revving up your car engine in the hope that it will accelerate faster from a standing start is the image which comes to mind when I see this name. And it's a playful allusion to the fact that being an SSD - it doesn't have any spinning or revolving parts - unlike the hard disk arrays it's designed to replace. Brands which, like this one, successfully suggest more than one idea from a single set of words create mental images which are easier for potential customers to remember. That can be more important than making a strong immediate impact.

• RocketDisk - was the name of one of the earliest US distributors of fast SATA flash SSDs for industrial markets. The company was active in 2008 and 2009.

• Rocket Drive - from Cenatek - used the concept of a rocket being fast in this PCI bus RAM SSD.

• Saber - from OCZ is an enterprise SATA SSD launched in 2014. The implication of saber is - "cutting edge" which also associates the idea of cutting edge technology.

• SpeedStor - from Superior Data Solutions - is the brand name for a range of fast rackmount SSDs.

• Supersonic - from Patriot Memory is a family of USB 3 flash drives.

• Swift - from Strontium is a family of 2.5" SSDs.

• tachIOn - from Virident Systems - is a family of PCIe SSDs. Although conceptually in the same speed category as the WarpDrive (below) - because a tachIOn is a faster than light particle - I have doubts about how many people actually understand the allusion or can be bothered to look it up.

• Tachyum - is the name of an SSD ecosystems company which emerged from stealth in 2017. The company said "tachyum" comes from the Greek tachy, meaning speed, combined with -um, indicating an element.

• Talino - from BiTMICRO - means "talented" in Filipino. Talino is the name given to the company's SSD controllers which were introduced in 2011.

• TiGiJet - from TiGi - used the idea of jet speed in its 3.5" SCSI RAM SSD accelerator.

• Titanium - is the name of an SSD family by MagicRAM - which is aimed at the military embedded market.

• ToughFlash - from GalaxyStor - was the name for a range of industrial 2.5" flash SSDs.

• Torqx - from Patriot Memory - is the name of a 2.5" flash SSD family. Torque is a measure of rotational force.

• Trrust-Stor - from Microsemi - is the name for a 2.5" military SSD family. Here the idea is that you can "trust this storage" drive with your data because it's protected from environmental stresses and hostile intent by an array of data integrity, reliability and security features.

• TuffServ - from Ampex - is the name of a rugged iSCSI SSD system.

• Ultra Drive - from Super Talent Technology - is a family of 2.5" SSDs. Your own imagination has to supply the parameters for which the "Ultra" drive is superior. "Ultra" has been used successfully as a brand booster in the past. In 1995 Sun Microsystems launched its UltraSPARC processor. The suggestion at the time was that the Ultra variety was better than all the other existing SPARC CPUs with prefixes like hyper, super, turbo, etc. Over 15 years of marketing UltraSPARC processors has lent a certain amount of gravitas to the Ultra prefix in the server world. But does any of that rub off into the storage world? It's nearly a decade since UltraSCSI was synonymous with "fastest DAS speed" in the storage market. So my view is that the concatenation - Ultra Drive - has low impact as an SSD brand.

• VeloBit is the name of an SSD software company founded in 2010 - aiming at the SSD caching market. The name "VeloBit" means "fast bit" (stream).

• Velocity - from ATP Electronics - is a family of industrial SSDs.
  
  Later - in 2013 - Velocity was the name given to a family of PCIe SSDs designed by Violin.

• WarpDrive - from LSI - is a PCIe SSD. As millions of Star Trek fans can tell you - warp drive (invented by - I can see his name but the name escapes me...) is the fast way to go when chasing (or evading) Klingons on the starboard bow. And warp is far superior in open space to the impulse drive. For the minority of people on this planet who don't get the Star Trek reference and yet who might still be in the market such an SSD - an alternative and equally valid reading of Warp Drive is that of a storage drive which can stretch to adapt to the load challenges it might encounter when used as a cache or SSD ASAP.

• the World's Fastest Storage - was the message used by Texas Memory Systems - when they were promoting their FC SAN rackount SSDs in 2001. They were the world's first enterprise SSD company to run banner ads to promote such products. (You can easily guess which site they chose to do that.) Below is an example of one of those early ads.

• XcelaSAN - from Dataram - sounds like it's something to do with "acceler"ating a SAN - which is what the product does. The more obvious coupling of these words - SANaccelerator - was already used 7 years earlier by Imperial Technology.

• Xtreme - from Flexxon - is a family of SSDs aimed at medical, industrial and auto markets.

• ZeusIOPS - from STEC - combines 2 ideas - Zeus (father of the gods in ancient Greek mythology) with IOPS - which is a measure of application speed.

• how fast can your SSD run backwards? - If you're trying to understand mysterious behavior in modeling SSD performance etc - 11 core SSD asymmetries are often the root cause.

• adaptive flash care management IP (including DSP) for SSDs - what is it? and who does it?
  
  In the future - all flash SSDs will have to use these new technologies which can magnify reliability and performance while reducing cost. As we go through the transition years - all the safe assumptions which you thought you knew about flash SSDs and suppliers will change.

• where are we now with SSD software? - and how did we ever get into this mess?
  
  In the next few years the software for SSDs will have as much of an effect as hardware architectuyre did in earlier years. But don't expect this to be an ordered top-down process.