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SSD Market 2007
I
called 2007 - the "Year of SSD Revolutions".
This was the
year in which
2.5" and 3.5"
flash SSDs from Mtron
and Memoright broke
away from the me-too performance pack - and showed that solo flash SSD drives
in traditional HDD form factors could economically challenge the R/W
throughput and random
IOPs of the fastest enterprise
hard drives.
Meanwhile
rackmount flash
SSDs from EasyCo (array
of COTS SSDs) and Texas
Memory Systems (proprietary flash array) showed that flash SSDs could
replace some market niches previously held by
RAM SSDs - at much
lower cost and without worrying about wear-out.
Fears and
myths about
endurance had in earlier years precluded flash as a serious contender in
high R/W applications. And although those problems would reoccur - with good
reasons - in later phases of the market - SLC was a safe technology choice in
server apps - provided the controller
architecture was designed correctly.
To clarify these new market
choices we published -
RAM SSDs versus
Flash SSDs - which is Best? - collecting wisdom from both sides of the SSD
civil war. |
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In
January 2007 - pageviews of
the Solid
State Disks Buyers Guide (the most popular article on STORAGEsearch.com)
increased by 74% compared to the year before period. Overall site
readership increased 31% compared to Jan 2006.
In February 2007 - amid competing claims from various other
oems
Mtron launched the
fastest 2.5" PATA SSD - with 80M bytes / sec sustained write time.
Cornice became the first
hard disk maker to be ejected out from the hard disk business due to inability
to compete with flash
SSDs.
In a blog
Key
Changes in Windows Vista - which discussed ReadyBoost etc - former
Microsoftie Vineet Gupta cited several SSD articles here on the
mouse site.
March 2007
What had been the profitable SSD business
in SimpleTech confirmed the legal change of its company name to
STEC.
SanDisk joined the
overheating market for 2.5" SATA SSDs... In fact there are more oems now
making 2.5" flash
SSDs than hard drives.
What does that tell you?
Intel (at long last) entered
the SSD market with an 8GB
USB connected module.
Super Talent
Technology extended its SSD range to include SATA interfaces and
Attorn
increased the speed and capacity of its
HyperDrive4.
Samsung said it has
developed a 64GB 1.8" flash SSD - which has a 60% faster write speed than
its earlier 32G model.
April 2007
STORAGEsearch.com
reported that SSDs were the 2nd most popular subject viewed by readers in the
preceding month - nudging hard
disks down to #3.
Fujitsu announced it had
terminated plans to manufacture 1.8"
hard drives for
portable products - because in this form factor
SSDs can offer better
speed, lower power, lower weight and lower cost.
STEC announced a 512GB
3.5" SSD.
Dell
joined the growing roster of notebook oems offering SSDs as a standard option.
May 2007
STORAGEsearch.com
published a dedicated directory of
flash SSDs. The
F-SSD vendor list had previously been buried within the
SSD Buyers
Guide. Extracting it with related articles, news and ads makes it easier for
readers to sift through the growing content in this segment.
MOSAID Technologies
announced its new flash chip technology could deliver 800M bytes / second
sustained throughput for flash SSDs using today's technology. That's 10x faster
than the fastest commercially available 2.5" SSDs.
PNY Technologies announced at
Computex, it will enter the SSD market with a product launch June 5th..
June 2007
DensBits founded.
STORAGEsearch.com reported that the
fastest climbing subject in May 2007 was
Flash - based Solid
State Disks - which became the 4th most popular destination visited by
readers in the same month that the page was introduced.
Concurrent Computer
launched the MediaCache 1000, the first in a line of
rackmount flash SSD
storage products based on COTS technology aimed at the
broadcast market.
SanDisk launched 64G
1.8" and 2.5"
flash SSDs for the
notebook market.
Cenatek launched the
Rocket Drive Micro:- an
ExpressCard
form-factor, high speed solid state disk designed for use with any ExpressCard
equipped laptop or desktop.
SanDisk launched 64G
1.8" and 2.5"
flash SSDs for the
notebook market.
Apacer showed a 2.5",
128GB flash SSD at
Computex and previewed an SSD based
RAID.
STORAGEsearch.com published a new
2.5" SSD Directory
with quick links to nearly 100 SSD models from 24 oems actively marketing SSDs
in the 2.5 inch form factor.
Myung unveiled its low
power MyStor product family which includes 2.5" IDE, and 3.5" IDE or
SCSI
flash SSD
products.
Samsung began mass
production of 64GB 1.8" SSDs for mobile computing applications.
STORAGEsearch.com published a
directory of the
Fastest SSDs in
each popular form factor....
SiliconSystems
said that it had received an additional patent for its PowerArmor voltage
detection and regulation technology. PowerArmor, used in the company's
SiliconDrives protects critical operating system files and application data
from corruption due to
power
disturbances.
July 2007
SiliconSystems
launched the first high reliability
USB SSD in CF form factor.
STORAGEsearch.com published a new
article - the Top 10
Solid State Disk OEMs
Solid Data Systems
launched the
StorageSPIRE, a
terabyte capacity Fibre
Channel connected SSD array.
STORAGEsearch.com published a new
3.5" SSD Directory
with quick links to over 22 SSD models from 11 oems.
SanDisk announced that
its SATA 5000 2.5-inch SSD will be offered as an option in IBM's new
BladeCenter HS21 XM.
August 2007
STEC announced it will
sample 3.5" SAS
SSDs in Q108.
Violin
Memory launched world's fastest 2U SSD.
VMETRO acquired
Micro Memory
Attorn said its
new rackmount HyperDrive4 provided the the lowest price per gigabyte for a
RAM based solid state drive.
Targa Systems launched a 64G
3U CompactPCI flash SSD with USB interface.
EasyCo launched its "Managed
Flash Technology" a storage system which includes a RAID-5 array of
flash SSDs with a
patent pending drive management layer which results in system write performance
that is 100x faster than the bare solid state flash drive.
STORAGEsearch.com published a new
article:- RAM SSDs
versus Flash SSDs - which is Best? With features from the world's
leading SSD companies this article looks at how technology and price trends have
reduced the gaps between the 2 main SSD technologies.
September 2007
BiTMICRO Networks
received $9.3 million in Series F funding and promised to ship 412GB 2.5"
flash SSDs in Q108.
Texas Memory Systems
launched the RamSan-500
- which delivers 2 terabytes of high speed flash SSD in a 4U rackmount package.
Performance is 100,000 IOPS sustained random read, 10,000 IOPS sustained random
write. Throughput performance from fibre-channel hosts to internal flash storage
is 2G bytes / sec sustainable (3G bytes / sec peak).
Objective Analysis
published a 110 page report called -
the
Solid State Disk Market: A Rigorous Look to their offering
Third I/O demonstrated a
prelaunch version of its Iris SSD at the Intel Developer's Forum in San
Francisco. Sustained performance reached 1,540MB/s on a single 8 Gb/s port.
Austin Semiconductor
announced its Solid State
Disk on Chip - a PATA compatible flash SSD in a 1.22" square footprint
with upto 16GB capacity.
October 2007
Addonics Technologies
launched what it called a "low cost large capacity SSD" platform. It's
a PCI card that can be installed with 4 Compact Flash cards with inbuilt
RAID support. The risk
with this approach is that most CF cards aren't designed for intensive write
operations and don't have wear levelling controllers. That means if a user
installs such a product in a server application - as a lower cost alternative to
a true SSD - the storage media may fail in under a year.
STORAGEsearch.com published the new
2nd quarterly ranking of -
the Top 10 Solid State
Disk OEMs
Texas
Memory Systems took part in an 8Gbps Fibre Channel demo at
Storage Networking World
Violin Memory said it would
announce a supported InfiniBand
interface for its Memory Appliance at November's
SC07 .
SiliconSystems
launched a postage-stamp sized
USB solid-state drive
designed for embedded storage applications - called the
SiliconDrive USB
Blade.
November 2007
BiTMICRO Networks
announced plans to sample a terabyte class 3.5" flash SSD in Q108. With
1.6TB capacity and a 4Gbps Fibre
Channel interface - it will deliver sustained throughput more than 230MBps
and upwards of 55,000 IOPS.
Samsung
Electronics announced it was sampling faster versions of its 64G 1.8"
and 2.5" SATA flash SSDs with sequential write speed of 100MB / sec
and sequential read speed of 120MB / sec.
SanDisk launched a PCIe
compatible 16G flash SSD.
Micron Technology said it
would launch a family of SATA 1.8" and 2.5" flash SSDs in Q1 2008
bringing the total number of market active
SSD oems to 60.
INTELLIAM launched its
LeanSTOR flash SSDs with AMC card form factor, SATA interface and 128GB
capacity.
December 2007
SSD Alliance is
founded to develop compatibility standards for flash SSDs.
RunCore launched the
E-drive, a PCIe SSD
with upto 256GB capacity and R/W speed upto 400MB/s or 200MB/s respectively.
STEC started shipping its
MACH8-MLC 1.8" and 2.5" PATA / SATA flash SSDs aimed at the notebook
market. While the performance is at the middle range of the market spectrum -
the new SSDs are available in high capacities upto 512GB (2.5"). Pricing is
aggressive. STEC offers this SSD family at pricing of $5/GB today, declining to
less than $2/GB within two years.
Toshiba said it will enter
the SSD market with 1.8" and 2.5" SATA models which will be sampled in
January 2008.
Commenting on the current success of the
disk to disk backup market
- STORAGEsearch.com predicted that
the earliest realistic threat to
hard disks as a backup
media (from solid state storage) wouldn't be before around 2014.
White Electronic Designs,
well known as a supplier of high
reliability
products in the military
market, announced its first medical series CompactFlash cards.
Objective Analysis
predicted that the
Hybrid Hard Drive
would not make a big splash in 2008 in a new 36-page report called Hybrid Hard
Drives: How, Why, And When? - The author Jim Handy said - "Unfortunately,
the hardware is ready but the software support is weak. Hybrid drives will have
to wait for better support to justify their small additional cost."
SSD
market revenue in 2007 reached $400 million according to a (later /
June 2008 ) report from IDC.
look ahead in history
SSD Market History -
2008
SSD
Market History - 2009
SSD Market History
- 2010
SSD Market History
- 2011
SSD
Market History - 2012
SSD Market History -
2013
SSD Market
History - 2014 |
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SSD news
SSD market research
flash SSD Jargon Explained
the Top 10 SSD Companies
3 Easy Ways
to Enter the SSD Market
the Problem with
Write IOPS - in flash SSDs
The enterprise
flash story... could it have been simplified?
3 things that could've
killed the nascent flash SSD market |
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| 2007 -
Year of SSD Revolutions? |
Editor: - August 2007 - One of the few
dates I can remember from studying European history (at the age of 16) was 1848.
1848 was
the Year of
Revolutions...
I don't think we did any dates before that. And due
to lack of time - we didn't quite finish the syllabus and reach the other end of
this historical slice - which was 1945. I think we only got as far as 1933
before the exams crept up on us.
The definition of "Europe"
in that academic context meant "continental Europe" and axiomatically
excluded the UK - as England (where the exams took place) was naturally not
considered to be a part of Europe.
As I found in later years there
are plenty of things that have happened in the world before and after these
magic dates - and most of these events have taken place outside the continent of
Europe (whichever definition of the old world you choose). But one benefit of
my history education has been that I've enjoyed many long hours reading about
history - since leaving school - without the narrative plot having been spoiled
by a fore-knowledge of what happened next.
Similarly with my knowledge
of English literature. When I am occasionally dragged to
Stratford upon Avon
to see a new production by the
Royal Shakespeare Company - I know that -
as long as it's not that one play we did for the exams - I don't know the plot -
or even whether it's supposed to be a comedy or tragedy - and I can enjoy it (or
not) without any previous prejudice.
But back to the Year of
Revolutions.
2007 is shaping up to be the Year of Revolutions
in the
Solid State Disk market.
Although
I've been expecting something like this for many years the new
SSD technology
announcements in the past year have included many twists and revolutionary
changes which will break down the barriers which once separated different
segments of this market.
The old
obsolete price
comparisons between hard
disk and flash SSD
pricing sound as
ridiculous today as
dinosaur print
media executives who still talk about the internet as "new media".
As I said to one reader this week "Hard disk pricing is
irrelevant for many parts of the enterprise SSD market." Even if hard
disks were free
- users will switch to SSDs if they have the right type of applications -
because the alternative cost of managing more servers, swapping out failed
disks, electrical power and data center floor space are too high - or
technically unfeasible.
The real battle in the enterprise server
market in the next few years will be internecine...
"RAM versus Flash
SSDs - which is Best?"
I invited the world's leading experts
to contribute to an article on this subject which was published August 20, 2007. | | |
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| How big was the
thinking in this SSD's design? |
Does size really does matter in SSD
design?
By that I mean how big was the mental map? - not how many
inches wide is the SSD.
The novel and the short story both have their
place in literature and the pages look exactly the same. But you know from
experience which works best in different situations and why.
When
it comes to SSDs - Big versus Small SSD architecture - is something which was
in the designer's mind. Even if they didn't think about it that way at the time.
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For designers, integrators,
end users and investors alike - understanding what follows from these simple
choices predicts a lot of important consequences. ...read the article | | | |
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| Surviving SSD
sudden power loss |
Why should you care
what happens in an SSD when the power goes down?
This important design
feature - which barely rates a mention in most SSD datasheets and press releases
- has a strong impact on
SSD data integrity
and operational
reliability.
This article will help you understand why some
SSDs which (work perfectly well in one type of application) might fail in
others... even when the changes in the operational environment appear to be
negligible. |
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