| Editor's
intro |
You can't buy
3.5" terabyte SSDs
with 1,024 megabytes per second sustained throughput yet. But they'll be
available a lot sooner than you might think. This article discusses the genesis
and future technology route of Terabyte ultra fast SSDs | |
...Later:-
as predicted
November 13, 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. | |
Terabyte class
solid state disks with
multi gigabyte per second sustained throughput have been around since
February 2003
as datacenter acceleration rackmounts. The best known example being the
Tera-RamSan from
Texas Memory Systems.
Despite the high price tag of such systems ($1 million in 2003 and
still somewhat North of $100K) many enterprises have been delighted to
discover that these products have offered enterprise wide application speedups
across hundreds of servers - at a much lower cost than traditional disk based
storage arrays - as published in numerous
case studies.
It
has been nice for the rest of us mere mortals (and that includes mouse mortals
not just the human variety) to learn about such products, but just as most of
us don't have our own personal jet, the ultra fast Terabyte SSD has not been a
technology that has affected our everyday lives.
But that will change,
a lot sooner than you may think.
2 recent news stories suggest that it
won't be too many years we see such a product appearing as a single 3.5"
flash SSD. It will
initially cost over $10,000 - but will be on a steeply declining
semiconductor cost curve - and may drop to as little as $1,000 by 2012. |
This prediction is solidly
based on extrapolating 2 separate announcements from
STEC and
MOSAID. In case you
missed them, here's a summary.
- In
April 2007 - STEC, Inc announced a 512GB solid state drive
aimed at video-on-demand services.
"STEC believes that
solid-state Flash drives with high-IOPS performance will address the growing
needs of the enterprise-class drive market. With NAND Flash prices declining on
a continued rapid pace, prices for
FC,
SAS and
SATA based
SSDs are expected to drop
below $2 per GB by 2012 which implies 512GB of high-performance storage for less
than $1,000. Based upon these capacity and pricing dynamics, STEC expects that
the high-IOPS SSD will make up a significant percentage of the $5 billion
high-performance hard-drive
market. This will make the comparative performance gains of SSD over HDD even
more compelling."
|
Squeak!
- the Fastest Solid State Disks
Speed isn't everything, and
it comes at a price. |
But if
you do need the speediest
SSD then wading through the web sites of over 70 current
SSD oems to find a suitable
candidate slows you down.
And the SSD search problem will get even
worse. |
 | |
I
predict there will be over 100 SSD oems in 2008.
I've done the
research for you to save you time. And this page is updated daily from
storage news and direct
inputs from oems. ...read
the article, | |
The
fastest 3.5" SSD
available today sustains 190MB/S and has a
Fibre-channel interface.
Although this device (made by
Curtis) is a
RAM based SSD it points
to the fact that even in the current state of the market the conventional
hard disk interfaces
such as SATA (which
are not stretched by rotating magnetic film technology) will have to get a move
on if they are to keep up with the bandwidth demands of high end SSDs.
Now's the time to start planning what you will do with the future
generation of ultrafast flash SSDs. It's going to change what species live in
the server farm. |
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For more information about
SSDs take a look at these resources
- Solid State Disks - is
our directory of SSD manufacturers, and includes current news stories related
to the SSD market
- Squeak! -
Why are Most Analysts Wrong About Solid State Disks? - describes the main
applications which account for nearly all the SSDs used, and gives the user
value propositions explaining why SSDs are taking over in these applications.
It includes strategic predictions about the market for the next several years.
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