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SSDs - all
the Fastest SSDs
the SSD Buyers Guide
the Top 10 SSD Companies
flash SSD Jargon Explained
Can you trust your flash
SSD specs?
Overview of the
Notebook SSD Market
SSD Myths and
Legends - "write endurance" |
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With the number of
SSD manufacturers now
exceeding 140 - I thought it was time to create a separate listing of
those who offer native
SATA interfaces.
There are over 30 manufacturers of SATA SSDs listed here and
new ones being added weekly.
SATA SSDs were the
most popular
product ads and editorial subjects viewed by our readers in the 1st 9
months of 2008. This reflects the wide range of applications for SATA SSDs
which spans from
notebooks,
and DAS server storage right upto datacenter accelerators integrated into SSD
RAID systems.
The rise to dominance of the SSD market by SATA devices
is chronicled below.
In 2004 - when storagesearch.com
conducted the industry's first
SSD Buyer Preferences
Survey 53% said that SATA compatible SSDs would suit their
applications best. At that time there were no SATA SSDs in the market.
SSD oems took heed of these results and by the end of 2005 there
were 4 SSD manufacturers offering SATA.
This had grown to 11 at the
end of 2006 and rapidly accelerated in the following years to 30+ companies by
the end of 2008.
Looking ahead at the
Flash SSD Performance
Roadmap
Indilinx and
MOSAID Technologies say
they are working on a 600MB/s SATA-3 SSD controller design. So users can expect
to see even more innovation in this part of the SSD market.
Will
SATA continue to dominate the 2.5" and 1.8" SSD markets?
In
October 2009 - Emulex
said it was expanding its
InSpeed
chip bridging technology to simplify the job for SSD oems of designing
fast native
SAS and
Fibre-channel compatible
flash SSDs.
But
I don't think that will change the dominance of SATA. As explained in an earlier
article about the SAS SSD
market.
At the low to medium end of the performance range - SATA
provides adequate performance for most 2.5" enterprise SSD arrays. If
SATA's performance is not high enough? - simply deploy a few more SSDs. The
much lower of SATA SSDs (compared to SAS and FC) - due to economies of scale
is another reason for customers to prefer them.
At the high end of the
performance range - PCIe
SSDs will become the preferred form factor in most new server apps. Lower
latency and higher throughput than SAS or FC go along with lower cost too.
Here's
some evidence to support that view. In September 2009 - StorageSearch.com disclosed that
search volumes for
PCIe form factor SSDs
had surpassed that for
2.5" SSDs for
the 1st time. And since then the gap has been growing.
Although there
will be a continuing market for SAS SSDs and FC SSDs - they will mainly be to
support traditionally engineered servers. Those markets will undoubtedly grow -
as users replace HDDs with SSDs - but they will still be a long way behind SATA
in volume and revenue. |
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