click to visit StorageSearch.com home page
leading the way to the new storage frontier .....
SSDs over 163  current & past oems profiled
SSD news ..
image shows megabyte waving the winners trophy - there are over 200 SSD oems - which ones matter? - click to read article
top SSD companies ..
image shows Megabye the mouse reading scroll - click to see the top 30 solid state drive articles
more SSD articles ...
SSD symmetries article
SSD symmetries ..
.....

the SSD Buyers Guide

by Zsolt Kerekes, editor

This is a rolling summary of SSD market highlights from the past year.

see also:- SSD news, SSD history, SSD futurology
April 2013 - Diablo named SMART as flash IP partner for ultra low latency SSDs
Diablo Technologies named SMART Storage as its exclusive flash partner to pioneer a new type of (faster than PCIe SSD) memory channel SSDs.

Fusion-io acquired NexGen Storage (an iSCSI hybrid array IP company) for $119 million.

Astute Networks launched new models in their ViSX family of fast-enough iSCSI rackmount SSDs - which have upto 45TB of raw SSD storage in a 2U rack which with dedupe enabled can deliver $2,000 / TB and even with dedupe switched off - comes in at about $5,000 / TB.

Kaminario launched its 4th generation HA SSD system - the K2 v4 - using SAS SSDs as the internal flash components - with 120 / 280 microsends R/W latency, 369K IOPS and 6GB/s theroughput per K block. The capacity density is 6TB usable per U at a cost of $10K to $15K per TB.

Crocus Technology announced it has been awarded a contract from IARPA to develop an 8-bit per cell memory based on its Magnetic Logic Unit technology.
March 2013 - Violin enters the PCIe SSD market
QLogic enterered the enterprise SSD market - with a 2 card set PCIe SAN IOPS caching accelerator. The FabricCache has upto 400GB flash, and 2x 8Gbps FC ports and can deliver upto 310,000 initiator IOPS and supports upto 2,048 concurrent logins.

Violin entered the PCIe SSDs market. Its full height Velocity cards have upto 11TB raw (8TB usable) capacity and deliver upto 500K IOPS.

Fusion-io acquired another storage software company - ID7 - which had been collaborating on the development of FIO's ION data accelerator software. ID7 was the primary developer of the SCST (SCSI target subsystem for Linux). Fusion-io also announced it had achieved 9.6 million IOPS (64 byte) from a single 365GB MLC ioDrive2 (PCIe SSD).

InnoDisk announced it will ship industrial SATA SSDs in Q3 using its iSLCT technology - which repurposes MLC as emulated SLC to get 30k write endurance from 3k standard cells.

OCZ announced the general availability of VXL 1.3 (SSD software) - which enables PCIe SSD flash volumes (on the company's Z-Drive R4) to be virtualized and synchronously mirrored, so they are continuously available to support HA and FT services from within the virtualized host without the need for any back-end SAN or storage appliance.

RunCore announced it has closed $10 million in Series B funding led by OFC.

Nimbus Data Systems announced that sys admins can monitor their HALO OS based family of rackmount SSDs via new apps on Android / Apple phones and tablets.

Diablo Technologies announced it has closed an additional $7.5 million of funding, increasing the total equity investment of its most recent round to $36 million.

EMC said it was sampling flash arrays which are designed and managed using the big SSD controller architecture based on leveraging IP from its acquisition of XtremIO.
February 2013 - Virident shares data on PCIe SSDs across multiple servers
Micron became the 19th company to enter the SAS SSD market.

Skyera announced $51 million in financing led by Dell Ventures and including an investment by WD.

Intel announced imminent shipment of a Linux version of SSD caching software called Intel CAS (Cache Acceleration Software) - based on the IP from its acquisition of NEVEX in August 2012.

Virident Systems announced beta availability of a new software suite - called FlashMAX Connect - which enables a single PCIe flash card - made by the company - to service multiple servers.

Silicon Motion announced imminent sampling of a new SSD controller - for consumer handheld products. The SM2703 works with 1x nm TLC NAND and enables full HD video recording for smartphones etc.
January 2013 - Seagate chooses Virident for big SSD architecture
Seagate made a strategic equity investment in Virident as part of a new collaboration agreement which includes remarketing Virident's PCIe SSDs and working together to design new SSDs for the enterprise market.

Violin acquired GridIron Systems.

Imation acquired Nexsan for $120 million.

RunCore was the 1st external company to announce BiTMICRO OnBoard SSD products - the Kylin III MAX family (fast PCIe SSDs).

Foremay shipped 2TB industrial 2.5" SATA SSDs with standard 9.5mm thickness.

Marvell announced it has made a strategic investment in Memoright.

BiTMICRO launched a marketing program to license its Talino SSD controller.

Toshiba began sampling a new range of 2.5" SAS MLC SSDs - with self encrypting security features and on board sanitization.
.
December 2012 - 1/3 of Micron's nand flash trade sales wind up in SSDs
Samsung acquired NVELO.

WhipTail announced a $31 million series C funding round from a group of investors including SanDisk.

BiTMICRO began manufacturing its maxIO (400K IOPS (PCIe SSDs) which use the company's Talino SSD controllers.

STEC announced that the company's interim CEO, and former CEO and founder Mark and Manouch Moshayedi have reduced their salaries to $1 to help the company reduce its operational costs.

Proton Digital Systems announced the immediate availability of its LDPC flash IP (a variant of adaptive DSP IP) for enterprise storage applications compatible with implementation using eASIC which enables enterprise storage vendors to double the throughput performance at approximately half the power that can be achieved using state-of–the art FPGAs.

Micron disclosed that in the past quarter SSDs had become 17% of Micron's nand business and the company estimates that 35% of the nand flash it supplies to trade customers end up in SSDs. MLC was about 80% to 85% of nand flash wafer production with SLC and TLC making up the rest.

Macronix described an experimental design of flash cells with on-chip annealing super heaters - which the company said could be used to refresh endurance to over 100 million cycles.
.
November 2012 - Diablo gets funding for alternative to PCIe SSDs
OCZ announced its reporting is being investigated by the SEC.

Diablo Technologies closed a $28 million funding round to bring their Memory Channel Storage concept to market. This is a new high speed direct attach like memory nand flash competitive alternative to PCIe SSDs.

Crocus Technology announced imminent sampling of high speed 1.2MB MRAM SIMs and small secure MRAM controllers - or what the company prefers to call - "Magnetic Logic Units" - aimed at the NFC-enabled smartphones market.

Samsung began production of 64GB eMMC SSDs which use 10nm flash geometry. Aimed at the phone and tablet market - R/W IOPS performance is 5,000 and 2,000 respectively. R/W throughput is 260MB/s and 50MB/s.

Micron signed an agreement with AgigA Tech to collaborate to develop and offer nonvolatile DIMM (NVDIMM) products using AgigA's PowerGEM (sudden power loss controller and holdup modules).
....
October 2012 - Samsung gets serious about SAS SSDs
Samsung entered the dual port SAS SSD market.

Proton Digital Systems emerged a bit more from stealth mode.

Cypress Semiconductor acquired Ramtron a maker of low capacity nvm called F-RAM (ferroelectric random access memory).

Fusion-io reported 59% year on year revenue growth for its recent quarter.

Bloomberg reported that Violin had already taken steps compatible with filing for a possible future IPO.

OCZ slimmed down its catalog and headcount - by 150 products and about 30% respectively - as part of an effort to re-engineer business efficiencies.

Virtium outlined a new 4 part categorization scheme for matching embedded industrial temperature rated SSDs to user cases and needs.
....
September 2012 - 3 of the top 10 SSD companies announced new CEOs
Virident announced a $26 million Series D funding round and a new CEO Mike Gustafson who joined the company from HDS.

Renice Technology launched a native USB 3 SSD (no bridge chips) using its own controller IP which supports the UAS (USB Attached SCSI) protocol, has SMART and power interruption data integrity protection and R/W speeds of 400MB/s and 320MB/s respectively.

RunCore launched its fastest yet PCIe SSD - the Kylin III PCIe - which has upto 1.4TB (usable) MLC capacity (full height, half length) R/W bandwith of 3GB/s and 2GB/s respectively - and R/W IOPS upto 700K / 500K (with 4KB blocks) and 3 / 1.4 million IOPS (512B). Read latency is 65µS (512B).

OCZ announced the resignation of the company's founder and CEO Ryan Petersen. Despite high revenue growth some investors said they lacked confidence in the strategic direction and management of the company - whose shares had spiked and then dropped again in the period leading up to this departure - on speculation that the company might be a takeover target.

STEC announced that Manouch Moshayedi, had stepped down from his positions as Chairman and CEO pending resolution of a civil complaint filed against him by the SEC.

Dataram announced it will develop a version of its RAMDisk software which will be rebranded by AMD in Q4 under the name of Radeon RAMDisk and aimed at gamers in the Windows market.
....
August 2012 - IBM acquires TMS, Skyera launches adaptive DSP powered enterprise SSD system
IBM announced it will acquire Texas Memory Systems.

Skyera launched its first product - a 1U half-depth 10GbE SSD rack with 44TB usable capacity ($131,000 approx), 3.6GB/s throughput and upto 1 million IOPS using under 800W electrical power. Integrated software includes inline dedupe, compression, snapshots, clones and various management functions.

IDT announced it's sampling single chip NVMe compatible flash SSD controllers for designers in the PCIe SSD market to suit standard sized cards and also smaller 2.5" PCIe SSDs. Supported features include hot pluggability, dual port access and bootability.

Fusion-io launched its ION software - a toolkit for bulding your own network compatible SSD rack by adding some Fusion-io SSD cards and their new software to any leading server.

Virident Systems announced it will ship a new generation of fast PCIe SSDs in September. FlashMAX II (pdf) has upto 2.2TB usable RAID protected MLC capacity, 103K random R/W IOPS (4kB 70:30 mix), and 1.1 million random read IOPS (512B), and <80µS random read latency (4kB) in a ½ length, low profile form factor.

Pure Storage cranked up the heat on its funding to $95 million with a new $40 million Series D funding round.

IT Brand Pulse launched its SSD Brand Leader Survey Report ($3,950, 19 pages) based on datacenter surveys. The scope ranges from controllers, drives and PCIe SSD cards through to various types of SSD systems.
....
July 2012 - DensBits and Skyera enter the Top SSD Companies List
OCZ reported that its SSD revenue for the recent quarter (ended May 31, 2012) grew 54% year on year to reach $106 million.

Intel acquired NEVEX - (an SSD software company with products in the SSD caching market.

In the 21st quarterly edition of the Top SSD Companies - published by StorageSearch.com - 2 new companies entered the list directly after exiting stealth mode in the same quarter:- DensBits and Skyera. This edition also analyzed the competitive advantages which SSD makers gets from using adaptive DSP ECC IP in SSDs and leveraging SSD software.

Proximal Data announced availability of its first product - a software based SSD ASAP - designed to work with PCIe SSDs - in particular - products from LSI and Micron.

....
June 2012 - Hynix acquired DSP SSD IP company LAMD
SK Hynix announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire Link_A_Media Devices

Seagate announced it will use DensBits's flash care technology in the design of forthcoming consumer and enterprise SSDs. Seagate has also made an equity investment in DensBits.

LSI demonstrated its SandForce SF-2000 flash controllers working with Toshiba 19nm and Intel 20nm NAND flash memory at Computex 2012 in Taipei, Taiwan.

SMART Storage Systems announced it's sampling yet another new variant of SAS SSD which uses adaptive flash DSP technology - the Optimus Ultra+ is a 2.5" SSD with 100K/60K R/W IOPS - which can endure 50 full random drive writes per day for a period of 5 years using commercial MLC NAND flash technology.

SanDisk launched a new family of bootable enterprise PCIe SSDs with upto 400GB (MLC) capacity ($2,350 MSRP) - the Lightning - which leverages SSD IP from 2 previously acquired companies (Pliant for the controller hardware and FlashSoft for the auto caching software).

BiTMICRO announced it has obtained over 600 IP assets from QualCore whose portfolio includes analog, digital, and mixed-signal IC design.

Kaminario announced it has secured a $25 million series D round of funding, bringing its total funding to $65 million.
....
May 2012 - SAS SSDs advance to 12Gb/s - SSD news
HGST demonstrated the industry's first 12Gb/s SAS SSD.

EMC announced it has acquired XtremIO for $430 million.

Fusion-io demonstrated its first ever 2.5" SSD. It connected via SCSIe.

StorageSearch.com published a new article analyzing the market for 2.5" PCIe SSDs

Apacer launched a new small (50.8 x 29.8mm) mSATA SSD aimed at the Ultrabook market with upto 256GB (MLC) capacity and R/W speed upto 470/200MB/s and 50K IOPS.

WhipTail launched a multi-protocol HA SSD rack called the INVICTA ($250,000 for a 6TB 6U 250K IOPS 200 µS latency model).

GreenBytes announced it has raised an additional $12 million in Series B funding which the company will use to expand sales and marketing of its iSCSI compatble rackmount SSD ASAPs.
....
April 2012 - SCSI Express initiative launched (SCSI for PCIe SSDs)
STA announced support for a new standard - SCSI Express (SCSI for PCIe SSDs).

Violin announced it has secured $50 million in Series D funding, which the privately owned company says gives it at an extrapolated market value of more than $800 million.

LSI announced details of its new Nytro family of SSD technologies - which integrate and join up several previously standalone elements in its product line in a new unified marketing roadmap which connects its legacy SAS software RAID controller stack to LSI/SandForce controllers via SSD ASAP acceleration software and a compatible family of PCIe SSD cards.

OCZ launched what the company says - is the industry's fastest IOPS 2.5" SATA MLC SSD family (across a range of apps) - the Vertex 4 (based on OCZ's own regular RAM cache Everest 2 controller) delivers 95K / 85K random IOPS (4K blocks) and 535 MB/s throughput.

Intel launched a new fast-enough PCIe MLC SSD - the 910 Series has upto 800GB capacity ($3,859) and 180K / 75K R/W IOPS (4K blocks). UBER is 1 sector per 1016 bits read.

Microsemi announced it is offering a new type of ruggedized SATA connector option for its its TRRUST-Stor SSDs which provides a complete vibration-resistant solution which eliminates pin fretting and intermittent disconnects to assure long-term dependability.

Dataram announced it had sold its patents portfolio related to solid state storage and SSD ASAPs for $5 million to Phan Tia Group while retaining the right to continue using these patents in its own current and future products.

DensBits announced it is sampling a new SSD controller - the DB3610 - which supports the latest 2Xnm and 1Xnm TLC (3 bits/cell ) MLC flash with an extreme endurance figure of more than 10K P/E cycles and R/W performance of up to 95MB/s / 65MB/s and 4,000 / 1,100 R/W IOPS (4KB), for sequential and random operations, respectively.

SMART announced that it has figured out a way to get 5x more endurance from consumer grade flash when using unmodified industry standard controllers from LSI/SandForce. The technique - which is used in a new fast-enough (enterprise component) 2.5" SATA SSD product family sampling this quarter - involves preconditioning parameters in the flash memory when the SSDs are assembled (or at first boot) using intelligence gained from experience with the company's population of closed-loop adaptive DSP controllers which are used in its Optimus family. SMART applies a safety margin to compensate for the open-loop aspect of these factors when managed by a SandForce controller to which these underlying dynamics are invisible.

StorCloud changed its name to Skyera.
....
March 2012 - Micron ships 2.5" PCIe SSDs
STEC started shipping CellCare MLC SSDs in the Slim SATA / MO-297 SSD form factor. The MACH16 Slim SATA embedded SSD (pdf) has upto 50GB usable capacity, and sustained R/W performance up to 245MB/s and 150MB/s respectively.

Hitachi GST (soon to be part of WD) announced that its 2.5" SAS SLC SSD product - the Ultrastar SSD400S is now shipping in EMC's VNX iSCSI arrays.

Micron announced that it has developed a 2.5" form factor, hot swappable, PCIe SSD which is being used in Dell servers.

UNH-IOL announced it is accepting founding members for the laboratory's new NVMe Consortium which will provide a vendor neutral location for members to test conformance of their PCIe SSD related products aimed at the NVMe compatible market.

Marvell announced mass deployment of its new high speed 6Gbps SATA SSD controller - the 88SS9187 which supports regular RAM cache (upto 1GB) and upto 500MB/s R/W even at dirty drive conditions. It supports on-chip RAID technology for the NAND device with flexible customer firmware based algorithms to optimize retiring of defective NAND block, plane, die or device and has the lowest power consumption of any controller in this performance class.

Texas Memory Systems introduced a new fast-enough MLC PCIe SSD into its product line as part of an SSD ASAP / caching bundle which includes software from NEVEX.

Memoright showcased its HTM series industrial SSDs - which using the company's proprietary adaptive write / DSP controller technology expand MLC flash endurance from 3,000 to 5,000 cycles (legacy controller standard) upto 20,000 cycles.
....
February 2012 - EMC and Intel join the LSI-SandForce-inside set
SanDisk announced it has acquired FlashSoft - one of the leading independent software vendors in the SSD ASAPs market.

Spin Transfer Technologies announced it has secured $36 million in Series A funding to accelerate development of its patented orthogonal spin transfer magneto resistive random access memory technology (OST-MRAM).

SMART Storage Systems launched the Optimus Ultra (a 1.2TB 2.5" 100K/60K IOPS, 500MB/s R/W SAS SSD) which uses the company's new, in-house developed, high reliability enterprise SSD controller IP - which includes DSP and adaptive programming techniques to deliver industry leading SSD data integrity and upto 25x / day full disk writes for 5 years endurance - while using low cost consumer grade MLC.

Greenliant Systems has started volume shipments of its industrial grade rugged SATA SLC SSDs on a chip (BGA - 14mm x 24mm x 1.95mm) - NANDrive GLS85LS - which have upto 8GB capacity, 70/60MB/s R/W, include zoneable password security and fast erase, and strong power fail data protection.

Intel announced it has used SandForce controllers for the first time in its new (and fastest) SATA 3 2.5" SSD - the Intel SSD 520 - which (with upto 80K R/W IOPS peak - 4KB) is aimed at gaming, CAD and graphics content creation markets.

EMC launched its new PCIe SSD based product line - VFCache - which as widely reported last month - leverages hardware designed by LSI and incorporates SandForce controllers.

Rambus announced it has acquired CMOx pioneer Unity Semiconductor for an aggregate of $35 million in cash. As part of this acquisition, the Unity team members have joined Rambus to continue developing innovations and solutions for next-generation non-volatile memory.

NEVEX announced a partnership agreement with Texas Memory Systems - which among other products includes software support for the RamSan-70 ( PCIe SSD).

VIA has selected Tensilica's Xtensa dataplane processors to use in a new design of SSD controllers.

GreenBytes announced imminent availability of its first pure SSD based storage array. The Solidarity is a high availability iSCSI 3U rackmount SSD with real-time dedupe and compression with upto 13.5TB raw capacity (60TB effective) and 120,000 4K IOPS performance.

OCZ announced imminent shipments of new high capacity PCIe SSDs optimized for cloud apps. The Z-Drive R4 CloudServ (which uses 16x SandForce 2581 SSD processors) has up to 16TB of storage capacity on a single full height card and is supported by auto-caching SSD ASAP functionality (based on the acquisition of SANRAD's VXL) and OCZ's VCA 2.0 which together enable host migrations without loss of performance or interruption of service.
....
January 2012 - OCZ and Micron acquire PCIe SSD software companies
OCZ announced it has acquired SANRAD for $15 million.

WhipTail announced it has secured a Series B funding round.

LSI announced it has completed the acquisition of SandForce.

Intel announced an agreement to acquire the InfiniBand related product lines, IP and business assets of QLogic.

RunCore announced it is shipping a 7mm high, Sandforce-based, 2.5" SATA 3 SSD for the high performance Ultrabook market.

IP-Maker released a data transfer manager core - for use in PCIe SSDs - the 1st design to be compliant with the NVM Express specification.

Micron announced it has acquired the assets of UK based Virtensys which marketed rackmount SSDs stuffed with Micron's PCIe SSDs and supported by a patented multi-server sharing virtualization interface.

OCZ demonstrated new PCIe SSDs - which use SSD controllers jointly developed with Marvell (instead of - as in previous models - controllers from SandForce).

Samsung entered the fast purge SSD market - which currently numbers about 25 companies. The company says that models of its PM810 2.5" SATA SSD family with its Crypto Erase technology deletes targeted data in a couple of seconds regardless of the overall volume of data or the capacity of the SSD. These models have been validated for compliance to NIST FIPS 140-2

pureSilicon launched a 1.6TB usable (2TB raw) 2.5" SATA eMLC SSD. The Nitro N2 has average latency under 100 micro-seconds, R/W speeds upto 540/520 MB/s and upto 130k random IOPS. The N2 uses a proprietary design and is protected against sudden power loss.

Fusion-io exceeded 1 billion IOPS (64 byte data packets) in a configuration which used 8 HP servers each configured with 8x ioDrive2 Duo PCIe SSD - in a historic demo this month showing the capabilities of its latency reducing Auto Commit Memory (ACM) extension.

TCS announced shipments of its Galatea - a rugged 200GB 2.5" SLC SSD which has has been verified by outside labs to meet MIL-STD-810 requirements for shock, vibration, temperature range, temperature shock, humidity and altitude. The new 40K IOPS SSD includes 128-bit AES encryption and full drive fast erase in less than 15 seconds.

Huawei Symantec published an SPC Benchmark report (66 pages pdf) for its high availability FC SAN rackmount SSD - the Oceanspace Dorado2100. A 1 terabyte (approx) usable protected (mirrored) SSD system (2.4TB raw) delivered over 100K SPC-1 IOPS at a market price of $0.90/SPC-1 IOPS.

Nimbus announced its entry into the high availability enterprise SSD market with the uveiling of the company's - E-Class systems - which are 2U rackmount SSDs with 10TB eMLC per U of usable capacity and no single point of failure. Interface support includes unified 10GbE, FC, and Infiniband. Pricing starts at $150K approx for a 10TB dual configuration system.
earlier SSD milestones
2011 - SSD market summary
SSD market history - 1970s to 2011

storage search banner

....
the SSD Buyers Guide
Megabyte had found a new way
to fund his SSD budget.
.
Fusion-io fast SSDs - click for more info
the standard for enterprise PCIe SSDs
by which all others are judged
ioDrives from Fusion-io
.
military SSDs
SSD software
industrial SSDs
consumer SSDs
enterprise SSDs
controllers & IP
.
SSDs by interface
.
FC InfiniBand iSCSI NAS PATA
PCIe SAS SATA SCSI USB
.

SSDs by form factor
.
SSDs on a chip 2.5" rackmount
1.8" and MO-297 slim 3.5" PCIe SSDs
.

general articles
.
what's an SSD?
Top SSD companies
SSD market history
... clarifying SSD pricing
SSD jargon explained
SSD education awareness
.
Virident FlashMAX.  - click for more info
Predictable, industry-leading PCIe SSD performance.
Scales across diverse workloads, data sets,
and sustains over time.
Learn more about - Virident FlashMAX
.
enterprise SSDs

MLC flash in enterprise SSDs
what do enterprise SSD users want?
High Availability enterprise SSD arrays
Survive and thrive guide to enterprise SSDs
Auto-tuning SSD Accelerated Pools of storage
RAM SSDs versus Flash SSDs - which is Best?
Legacy versus New Dynasty in Enterprise SSDs
7 SSD types will satisfy all future enterprise needs
Understanding what shapes flash SSD performance
Efficiency - making the same SSD - with less chips
Rackmount SSDs - open vs proprietary architectures
what do I need to know about any new rackmount SSD?
Bottlenecks in the pure SSD datacenter will be more serious
.
image shows Z-Drive R4 f- one of the world's fastest PCIe SSDs -  designed by OC
bootable virtualized PCIe SSDs
the Z-Drive R4
from OCZ
.
notebook SSDs

HDDs v Flash SSDs
the consumer SSDs guide
Notebook SSDs overview
What's the best PC / notebook SSD?
Encryption - impacts in notebook SSDs
why the notebook SSD crystal ball is still murky
Why Consumers Can Expect More Flaky Flash SSDs!

rugged SSDs

military storage
Fast Purge flash SSDs
the changing face of the industrial SSD market
.
WD SiliconDrive N1x  for mission-critical appls which need  high reliability - click for more info
2.5" reliable SLC SSDs
from Western Digital

SSD performance

RAM SSDs
the fastest SSDs
the 3 fastest flash PCIe SSDs?
Can you trust flash SSD specs?
RAM Cache Ratios in flash SSDs
how fast can your SSD run backwards?
the Problem with Write IOPS - in flash SSDs
.
Optimus Ultra plus  is the  highest rated SAS SSD from SMART
2.5" SAS SSDs
upto 50 DWPD for 5 years
Optimus Ultra+ from SMART

SSD reliability

SSD recovery
Increasing Flash SSD Reliability
SSD reliability papers (collection)
SSD Myths & Legends - "write endurance"
SSD power down management architectures
Data Integrity Challenges in flash SSD Design

SSD design

SSD Controllers / IP
3 easy ways to enter the SSD Market
What's the best way to design a flash SSD?
Adaptive flash care management IP with DSP for SSDs

SSD forecasts

After SSDs... what next?
this way to the petabyte SSD
SSD Market Adoption model
SSDs market size & projections
Predicting trends with SSD market boundaries analysis

other SSD info

SSD market analysts , SSD Bookmarks, SSD videos
.......
SSD ad - click for more info
.......
Targa Series 4 - 2.5 inch SCSI flash disk
2.5" removable military SSDs
for airborne apps - from Targa Systems
.......
"...a new threat for SAS SSD slots inside server racks has been emerging in the past year with PCIe interfaces appearing in removable and 2.5" PCIe SSDs..."
...from:- SAS SSD - market timeline
.......
SSD ad - click for more info
.......
Are you still worrying about endurance?
Endurance and the risk of wear-out in flash SSDs is still a subject I still get a lot of questions about - even though it's had extensive coverage in articles on StorageSearch.com since 2004.

The questions usually come from newcomers to the enterprise SSD market - who are looking at high performance flash SSDs (usually PCIe) and who have already read some of my articles - and want to know - how much they should still worry (or not) about the topic.

Here's a composite of some recent email exchanges on this subject.

Reader:- is endurance still a reliability risk in enterprise SSDs?

Editor:- Yes. You can read more here - (flash wars in the enterprise). But it's more of a problem for SSD designers than for users.

"All SSDs are not created equal." I wrote that 10 years ago and it's still true today.

It's still all too easy to buy an MLC flash system which will fail in high IOPS environments within a few months.

On the other hand you can also buy a lot of MLC SSDs which could last for 5 years or more in the same environment.

And some enterprise SSD makers have already been shipping MLC into heavy duty enterprise apps for 4 to 5 years already.

SSD companies have developed various design techniques to mitigate the endurance problem:-
  • adaptive interaction with the flash - chip calibration and adaptive programming durations combined with DSP
  • throttling performance downwards when SMART stats show write life budgets are getting low
Another problem not often discussed is that the incidence of recoverable read errors can increase in some heavily used MLC systems over time. These don't stop the system working but can slow it down.

Every new flash memory chip generation means the old ways of dealing with the problem have to be changed as safety margins shrink. If you attach the newest flash memory chips to a controller with management techniques which worked OK 2-3 years ago - the SSD might fail in a few months. Changing memory supplier can be deadly too - even in the same memory generation.

some enterprise flash SSDs are significantly better

Bottom line is - some enterprise flash systems are significantly better than others. And it's the system design rather than the raw chips which makes the biggest difference.

Lifetimes quoted today are always extrapolated and could be wrong for unforeseen reasons.

If you're worried - one strategy is to choose suppliers who have already demonstrated that they have been working on high reliability mission critical flash storage for years. It's easy to check the longevity of a company in the SSD market by reading their company profiles here on StorageSearch.com and other sites too.

Many consumer SSD makers have recently gravitated towards the enterprise SSD market attracted by its more lucrative goldrush potential. Does having years of notebook SSD experience mean that companies understand how to design reliable enterprise SSDs too?
click to see the collection of  SSD reliability articles here on StorageSearch.com The reliability engineering and architectural skills aren't the same. And endurance is just one of the many important differences. Some consumer SSD vendors will succeed the transition to enterprise markets better than others.
.......
What's the best / cheapest SSD?
Editor:- I often get emails from readers who ask the question - What's the best / cheapest SSD?

click to read this article So I wrote an article / faqs page compiled from various emails I had sent to answer the question... of why I can't answer your question - because you need to ask yourself more questions first. ...read the article
.
SSD ad - click for more info

StorageSearch.com is published by ACSL