| Editor's
intro |
You can't buy
3.5" terabyte SSDs
with 1,000MB/s 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 small form factor SSDs | |
| Z's Laws - Predicting
Future Flash SSD Performance |
A a reader asked me a
very good question.
"Is there an industry roadmap for future
flash SSD
performance?"
That prompted other questions like...
- How fast are flash SSDs going to be in 2009?, 2010? or 2012?
- What are the technology factors which relate to flash SSD throughput and
IOPS?
- How close will flash SSDs get to
RAM SSD performance?
There wasn't a simple answer I could give at the time. Clues lay
scattered all across this web site
and in my many one on one discussions with readers about the market... |
 |
But I agreed there should be
a single place on the web where these answers could be found.
Forget
Moore's
Law. That gives you the wrong answer, and this article explains why. ...read the article | | |
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." |
- ...Later:- in November 2007 - the capacity part of the terabyte GB/s 3.5"
SSD was met when BiTMICRO
Networks announced plans to sample a terabyte class 3.5" flash SSD in
Q108. BiTMICRO said - with 1.6TB capacity and a 4Gbps
Fibre Channel interface -
it will deliver sustained throughput more than 230MBps and upwards of 55,000
IOPS.
|
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 130 current
SSD oems to find a suitable
candidate slows you down.
And the SSD search problem will get even
worse. |
 | |
| 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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| We have
hundreds
of SSD articles on StorageSearch.com |
Here, below, are some
examples.
- SSD
Market History - lists product and technology milestones in the 30 years of
the SSD market upto the end of 2009.
- RAM Cache
Ratios in flash SSDs - it's important to know the underlying RAM cache
architecture - even if you're happy with the R/W and IOPS performance.
- 2010 - 1st Fizz
in the SSD Bubble? - even the dogs in the street know this is going to be a
multibillion dollar market. Greed will play as big a part as technology in
shaping the
SSD year ahead.
- the pros and cons of
using SSD ASAPs - auto tuning SSD appliances are a new category of SSD
which entered the market in the 2nd half of 2009 to accelerate servers without
needing human tune-ups. How can you tell if they are right for you? And how
well do they work?
- the Problem
with Write IOPS - in flash SSDs - long established as a useful performance
modeling metric - this article explains why some specs are exaggerated when
applied to flash SSDs - or predict the wrong results for many common
applications.
| | | |
