Editor:- August 10, 2009 - Intel has been in the
computer news in recent weeks for
suspending
further shipments of its new
X25-M -
SATA 2.5" MLC flash SSD due to a serious design problem.
Potential
customers were advised that shipments will resume after what is euphemistically
called - a "firmware upgrade".
This is not the 1st time that
Intel has shipped a flaky SSD, and it's not the 1st time that a
flash SSD
manufacturer has shipped products where the design was incompletely verified
(or specified) in the 1st place - requiring a frantic firmware upgrade to make
its operational use more satisfactory.
And it won't be the last either.
These stories have become commonplace. And because the latest Intel fiasco
wasn't a surprise - it didn't rate more than a footnote in
these pages.
Newcomers
to StorageSearch.com may be
shocked that by the frequency with which the storage market's reputation is
being splatted by the residue from so many unreliable new products. And by
that I mean - products whose operation you cannot rely on to be what you
reasonable expected - instead of the narrower meaning of "products
which are dead on arrival" - or which terminally cease operation due to
some form of wear-out,
environmental or age related process.
I named
storage reliability
as 1 of the 3 most important future trends in my
state of the storage market
article published in 2005. In that article I also predicted that uncorrectable
failures in storage systems (due to embedded design assumptions made in earlier
generations) could, if not dealt with by drive and interface designers, pose a
more serious threat to enterprise computer systems than the Y2K bug
in the late 1990s.
It's reasonable to ask - why has the flash SSD
market gained such a poor reputation?
I explained why users
shouldn't trust
published flash SSD benchmarks in an article published a year ago - in which
I discussed the technical environment and specific reasons related to
performance. But it's clear from readers emails that many concerned SSD
consumers don't have the technical background to understand much of the
content in this and the more detailed articles comparing
MLC and SLC,
RAM and flash SSDs
etc. I often have to explain that when it comes to SSDs - StorageSearch.com
isn't aimed at the consumer market - but at enterprise users and oem specifiers
of SSD technology who - in the course of their vendor qualification -
invest a lot of time and resources into learning about SSDs - before making a
commitment which could cost them their jobs or business if the choice
turns out to be wrong.
When we started our intense SSD coverage more than
10 years ago,
a typical flash SSD cost $50K and a typical rackmount cost an order of magnitude
more.
Why do you have to be so "extremely" careful to
understand the internals of a flash SSD?
You probably don't - if all
you're doing is buying a single
notebook SSD
for a single notebook. (Treading "very" carefully - will suffice.) You
definitely do need to exercise extreme caution- if you're the person designing
SSDs into a new notebook or new SSD storage array, IPTV server, voicemail
server, defense appliance or search-engine architecture. That's only a small
part of the spectrum of reader questions I get asked about related to SSDs -
and why I try to avoid giving simplistic answers. Until now...
Here's
a simplistic explanation of why you have to be careful about
understanding flash SSD technology before you deploy it in serious apps, and why
SSD vendors will continue shipping flaky SSDs and then recalling them or fixing
them after the sale for several more years...
Flash SSDs are solid
state - but different to processors because... When Intel or AMD or Sun design
a new processor - they run test suites on the new design - which encapsulate
market knowledge amassed during more than 20 years. These verification suites
simulate the kinds of loads which are common and uncommon in the market. When a
new processor emerges into the market - the design is already compatible with
what the market expects - because the test suite defines the product. Similar
test suites have been developed by all hard drive manufacturers - which include
a knowledge awareness of all the tricky quirky ways that operating systems and
applications are going to hit the hard drive - and how it is expected to
respond.
There are no such industry
test suites for flash
SSDs. That's because a flash SSD can look like a disk drive in some contexts -
and it can look like a processor accelerator in others. The range of
applications for SSDs is much greater than for hard drives - and SSDs have many
different ways they can implement the same features depending on which market
they were designed for. One reason why the flash SSD market has been going
wrong with so many new products is that most consumer SSD manufacturers have
simply re-used their hard drive test suites to validate their new SSDs. That has
put pressure on designers to tweak the
SSD controllers to
make their products look good in benchmarks (and look more saleable). But the
test suites don't test the weaknesses of the SSDs - only the strengths.
There
are 2 general exceptions.
Flash SSDs designed specifically for the
industrial
oem market tend to be better designed - because these vendors know their
products will be hammered by lengthy customer evaluations before being deployed.
Many industrial flash SSD oems are used to testing their products with the
entire code of their customers' embedded products. Over many years they have
built up experience of the weak parts of their products - and either adapted
the firmware in their SSDs - or suggested ways in which their customers can
change their software to work better with their SSDs.
Rackmount flash SSD
arrays designed for enterprise server acceleration include a span of products
and companies - whose applications experience ranges from nil to decades. But I
can offer a simple solution to shortlisting an SSD supplier here.
In
the world's first comprehensive survey of
What SSD Users Want -
instigated by StorageSearch.com in 2004 - we posed the question - "What
would make it easier for you to buy SSD technology and remove doubts and risks
which currently act as roadblocks?" - The top 2 factors quoted in replies
were performance guarantees and try before you buy. Some
enterprise SSD oems seeing this market feedback were quick to adapt these
concepts to the way they did business.
My advice? - If you're planning
to make a big enterprise SSD purchase - tell suppliers that you'll only consider
their products if they offer you a money back performance guarantee (which
they can easily do if they have enough experience with your type of application)
or ask them if they will let you "try before you buy" - (if your
application environment is unusual and outside the scope of their speedup
models).
How can consumers and SMBs navigate around SSD landmines?
If you're a consumer or small business looking at a modest spend
on flash SSDs it's probably unrealistic for you to invest the resources to
learn about this technology and safely qualify products for yourself. As I've
already said above - you can't trust magazine reviews either. They should just
be regarded as an indication of what is possible - rather than a guarantee of
what you'll see in practice.
My advice is - talk to a specialist
SSD
reseller.
I know of less than 10 SSD VARs worldwide who have
been focusing exclusively on SSDs for consumers as their primary business for
many years - but I'm not an expert on VARs. There may be more.
It's
counter productive for SSD VARs to recommend products which are difficult to get
hold of - or which have high return rates. Tell them what is important to you -
and ask what they recommend. Ask them how long they've been in the SSD market
too. If it's less than 2 years - go somewhere else. One way you can
independently verify if what they say is true - is checking out web references
to their SSD activities - including for example their website listings in past
years in the
Internet Archive.
Will it
get easier to navigate the SSD market in future?
Yes. Sure. But
that could be another 5 years in the future. I think the SSD market will
get a lot more
complicated and
confusing before it gets any simpler.
To help you understand
what's going on and see the future clearly I hope you'll come back to
StorageSearch.com as we continue our long term mission - of "leading the
way to the new storage frontier". |
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