| How
Bad is Choosing the Wrong SSD Supplier?........................ |
How
significant is it - if you choose the wrong partner / supplier for your SSD
strategy?
It's a momentous decision. Don't kid yourself that high-end
SSDs are clones / generic products. Like thoroughbred horses they have
personalities. It takes time to get to know them and get the best out of them.
Rushing in to make a quick convenient choice - could backfire.
Here
are some examples of significant decision points that I've seen people make in
my career.
Is it as bad as bad as - choosing the wrong
microprocessor back in the mid 1970s?
Most companies hadn't
invested in too much software, by the end of the 1970s, when vendors started
touting their 16 bit micros. (Some real, some imaginary and some which would be
very late to get working.) Intel's marketers even had a conversion program - in
which they said - you could feed Motorola 6800 assembler in one end and see
Intel 8086 assembler coming out the other end - which actually ran faster than
on the Mot hardware. I don't know if anyone actually did that. Most engineers
at that time were quite happy to rip and replace their 1st or 2nd generation
micro designs and switch to something new.
Apple was
the big exception. Apple had created the consumer desktop PC market and was
locked into a huge investment of 8 bit assembler for - what turned out to be
a dead-end processor - the
6502.
Despite heroic efforts - that mistake lost them the ownership of the desktop PC
market - to Intel and Microsoft.
Is choosing the wrong SSD supplier as
significant as - choosing the wrong CPU/OS platform for your mid range
server in the early 1990s?
If you chose DEC's VAX (which looked
like a safe choice for many companies who already had such servers) - that led
to a merry dance which involved ditching VAX for Alpha and ditching VMS for
variously named flavors of Unix, and then finally ditching the whole lot.
Wintel didn't have fast enough processors or scalability in those days - and was
barely good enough as a single user PC platform.
SPARC was the
market's favorite vote - and peaked at over $20 billion annual revenue in 2000
before it failed for a bunch of technical, competitive and market reasons.
In
my view choosing the right SSD supplier for strategic projects is nearly as
important as any of the choices above were in their own time. A successful
implementation will enable your organization to do things better, faster and at
lower cost than your competitors. And in some projects the SSD will enable
applications which would not have been possible at all.
Although you
can switch SSD suppliers - by the time you realize that your initial choice was
a mistake - you could have lost valuable months of having a head start with the
new opportunities enabled by SSD technology. And - if things got really bad -
you could lose your reputation, your job and maybe your business too.
I'm
often asked - what is the best choice of SSD? - My answer is - that it
depends what you're trying to do, what your current state of technical
competence is relative to SSDs and the apps you're trying to improve. Also - how
much effort and resources you're willing to invest to make it work for you. That
formula gives a different answer for everyone. So it's not surprising that in my
article predicting the
SSD market
confusion in 2009 I said that customers are going to solve apparently
identical problems in completely different ways.
There are already
hundreds of articles about the SSD market on
StorageSearch.com - and there are a
lot more articles and directories in the pipeline. But it can never be enough.
That's one of the reasons I started the recent
SSD Bookmarks Series
- to give leading people in the industry a way to share the views from
different vantage points in the multi-dimensional SSD landscape. They will send
you to many interesting places. But I hope you'll still find the
mouse site a
helpful starting point for your future SSD searches. |
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| Why Consumers Can Expect
More Flaky Flash SSDs! |
Editor:- August 10, 2009 - a
new article published
today on StorageSearch.com
explains why the consumer flash SSD quality problem is not going to get
better any time soon.
You know what I mean. Product recalls, firmware upgrades,
performance downgrades and bad behavior which users did not anticipate from
reading glowing magazine product reviews. And that's if they can get hold of
the new products in the first place. |
 |
We predicted this
unreliability scenario many years ago. And you have to get used to it. The new
article explains why it's happening and gives some suggested workarounds for
navigating in a world of imperfect flash SSD product marketing. ...read the article | | |
| . |
| Are MLC SSDs Safe
in Enterprise Apps? |
This is a follow up
article to the popular
SSD Myths and
Legends which, a year earlier demolished the myth that flash memory
wear-out (a comfort blanket beloved by many
RAM SSD makers)
precluded the use of flash in heavy duty datacenters.
This new
article looks at the risks posed by MLC Nand Flash SSDs which have recently
hatched from their breeeding ground as chip modules in cellphones and morphed
into
hard disk form
factors. |
 |
It starts down a familiar
lane but an unexpected technology twist (which arrived in my email while
writing this article) takes you to a startling new world of possibilities.
...read the
article | | |
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Can You
Trust Flash SSD Specs & Benchmarks? |
| Sadly no! - Many
published benchmarks for flash SSD are about as reliable as bank
valuations of Collateralized Loan Obligations (just before the onset of the
Credit Crunch). |
There are many
intrinsic technical reasons why you can't believe most published benchmarks
for flash SSDs (whether done by magazines or vendors) and why
even the tests you carefully do yourself don't give reliable results
which correlate with how the SSD will perform in real-life
applications.
We warned you of it this problem here
on StorageSearch.com - and now other publications and vendors are starting
to take it seriously too. ...read
the article | |
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