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Cheetah Joins Fastest SSD
List
Editor:- July 2, 2009 - Foremay has recently
announced one of the fastest
2.5" SLC flash
SSDs in the market.
The SATA compatible
SC199 Cheetah
V-Series has sustained R/W speeds of 260MB/s and /250MB/s respectively and
42,000 random IOPS. Capacity options range from 32GB to 256GB.
Editor's
comments:- that makes the 3rd Cheetah in my
Animal Brands in
the Storage Market Directory. Click on the link to see the full storage
zoo.
SSD Market's Biggest Shifting Trends?
Editor:- July
1, 2009 In a fast growing market like
SSDs - how do you spot the
most significant trends?
I discuss the 2 most significant changes in
the past year and how I think they will affect the future market in my new
preface to the
SSD buyers guide
published today.
SSD Guide Maintains Momentum
Editor:- June 30,
2009 - Despite the fact that June's not yet over - pageviews of the
SSD buyers guide
this month are already 58% higher than a year ago.
Listings of
the most popular subjects and articles this month can be seen, as usual, on the
storage market research
page.
My new article on the
SSD Notebook
market is only 2 weeks old - but already in the top 20 articles viewed this
month.
Looking ahead to July -
StorageSearch.com will publish a
new directory for
MRAM.
This is a market which has been in the so-called "emerging" state for
more than a decade. But due to the low capacity of commercially available
products, its use has been restricted to embedded markets in which no other
technology can do the job - such as car crash recorders in which the write speed
of flash is too slow, and
high mechanical forces have precluded the use of battery backed
RAM.
The big
bucks lure of the flash
SSD market has gotten the attention of MRAM developers. They're waking up to
the industry changing possibilities that could occur if they can deliver higher
capacity products. Over the next few years - this is one of several non volatile
memory technologies we'll be talking about more.
The 9th
quarterly edition of the the
Top 10 SSD OEMs will be published after the holiday on July 7. That's got
a big surprise in it - which you'll see when it's published. It will reveal a
lot about the changing currents in the market - and the upwards (and
downwards) shifts in SSD search affinity.
Increasing the Usefulness of Cheap SSDs with Virtual SAN
Software
Editor:- June 24, 2009 -
Seanodes
disclosed
results
of tests using entry level SSDs
with its
Exanodes
virtual SAN software.
In an ESX environment of 8 servers with 1
SSD drive per server, IOmeter benchmark results showed 36,000 IOPS (random read
4K) for a system with an overall cost under $20K (including the cost of SSDs and
Exanodes VM Edition).
"'Traditional arrays have been designed to work efficiently with
spinning disks and can't give the promise of SSDs in terms of performance and
scalability for example," said Frank Gana, Business Development Director at
Seanodes. "This limits the usage and markets and as a consequence most
people use them as Direct Attached Storage with all the usual known problems
that come with DAS. Thanks to Exanodes and its innovative design we can
aggregate and use SSDs efficiently, opening new markets and applications to this
technology".
Editor's comments:- Seanodes says it's trying to
fix the problem of aggregating and sharing multiple low capacity, low cost
SSDs between servers without requiring special tuning skills. But I have to
say the quoted IOPS don't sound impressive to me compared to the
fastest SSDs. So
why wouldn't you use less servers and a better SSD instead?
With so
many other competing solutions in the
rackmount SSD and
PCIe SSD market - I
suspect that Seanode's solution may only provide an economic price point for a
tiny fraction of possible applications - or none at all. There isn't enough
data in the press release to be sure.
Samsung Samples Netbook SSD
Editor:- June 23, 2009 -
Samsung is
sampling a SATA mini-card SSD for use in the expanding
netbook
marketplace with these key parameters:-
- footprint:- 30mm by 51mm by 3.75mm
- weight:- 8.5g
- capacity options:- 16GB, 32GB and 64GB
- R/W speeds:- 200MB/s and 100MB/s respectively
- power:- 0.3W
"The market is beginning to embrace a
smaller SSD for the
nascent netbook sector," said Jim Elliott, vp, memory marketing, Samsung
Semiconductor.
Crossing the T's in STEC's SWOT
Editor:- June 23,
2009 - what are the biggest threats to STEC?
The
PCIe SSD market and
server oems designing their own
2.5" SSDs are
among the many factors analyzed in a new article on our
home page today.
Fast IOPS Hard Drive Concept Resurfaces
Editor:-
June 22, 2009 - last week Dataslide announced
it was close to
productizing
its revolutionary hard drive technology.
Why mention it here? On
these SSD pages...
We all thought it safe to assume
there
aren't going to be any faster hard drives.
I know most of you don't
look at the HDD news
any more. That's why I'm repeating it here. It may be out of context
technology-wise - but it's definitely hard core SSD subject matter market-wise.
If successful - Dataslide's technology (which we first reported on 7 years ago)
would deliver similar IOPS and throughput performance as a mid range PCIe SSD
- but at the media cost of a hard drive.
That would add more
complicated choices to an already complex market for inside the box server
accelerators.
91% of Compellent's Customers Want to Evaluate SSDs
Editor:-
June 17 , 2009 Compellent
today announced results generated through attendee polling conducted at its
annual customer conference.
91%
of business partners and 78% of customers responded important, very
important or critical when asked, "What is your level of interest in
evaluating SSDs in your
environment?"
NextIO Unveils PCIe flash SSD
Editor:- June 17, 2009
- NextIO today
announced
it will demonstrate a 12 slot
PCIe flash SSD system,
designed in collaboration with
Marvell later
this month.
Each slot will be capable of over 200,000 IOPs and offer
400GB capacity.
Editor's comments:- there are nearly as many
companies making PCIe SSDs
today - as there are making 2.5"
SSDs. And it wouldn't surprise me to see the PCIe SSD oem count to become
the larger of the two.
With the growing number of
SSD controller and IP
companies in the market it's getting
easier to design
SSDs.
An electronics college graduate could probably build a
passable demonstration product as a summer project. But it's another matter
entirely - how well such a college demo unit would work in a variety of
applications and OS platforms. There's no shortcut to market experience. Users
will have to judge how much it's worth becoming beta sites for the mass of new
SSD companies flooding into the market.
NextIO is better
funded than most
students. The most recent
$15
million funding round announced earlier this month took their total to
over $55 million.
WD Ships SiliconDrive III
Editor:- June 16, 2009 -
Western Digital
Solid State Storage announced that it has begun shipping its new
SiliconDrive III
SSD product family which includes 2.5" SATA and PATA and 1.8" Micro
SATA products with target read speeds up to 100MB/s and write speeds to 80MB/s
in capacities up to 120 GB.
"SiliconDrive III is the first example of how WD plans to
productize solid state technology developed by SiliconSystems. The launch of
SiliconDrive III will also enable WD to leverage its global sales and
distribution channels to accelerate the adoption of SSD technology beyond
SiliconSystems' traditional embedded systems OEM customer base into data
streaming applications such as multimedia content delivery systems and data
center media appliances," said Michael Hajeck, senior VP and GM of WD's
solid state storage business unit. "SiliconDrive III is an ideal solution
for OEMs that require increased performance, capacity,
reliability and
data throughput in their applications."
Editor's comments:-
some oems in the small form factor flash SSD market have earned a bad
reputation due to shipping sexy sounding products in volume before the
design and qualification process was adequately completed.
In contrast
- SiliconSystems' SiliconDrives were never the fastest products in their class -
but due to the background of its founders - the company's prime concern was to
design SSDs that were reliable and stayed reliable. When WD looked at the
spectrum of SSD technologies to acquire - an important consideration was this
proven reliability - established in millions of products over many years.
Of
all the SSD parameters to tweak - the easiest one is to make a product faster.
But. as many other HDD and SSD companies have learned you can't quickly fix
a reputation for flaky products.
New Notebook SSD Market Overview - is not pretty
Editor:-
June 15, 2009 - StorageSearch.com
published a new article today called -
Overview of
the Notebook SSD Market.
There's a simple way to summarize
the complex view of the SSD Notebook / Netbook market.
Lots of
initial hype and optimism that the market would deliver an astonishingly
new product experience to users, followed by dismay and disillusion due to
a flurry of poorly conceived, badly designed and ineptly executed products.
...read the
article
PhotoFast Launches ExpressCard SSD
Editor:- June 12,
2009 - PhotoFast
launched the fastest
ExpressCard.
Initially
for the Japanese market, the G-Monster Express card 54 has R/W speeds upto
180MB/s and 100MB/s respectively.
DTS Promises Fastest 2.5" SATA SSD
Editor:-
June 12, 2009 - DTS
today confirmed it has won a
best
of show award at Interop
Tokyo 2009 for its Platinum SSD.
Editor's comments:-
DTS's original Platinum drive was a
3.5"
hybrid - which
included a RAM SSD accelerated
hard drive. The
internal SSD controller
virtualized the interface to make it appear as an OS agnostic
SATA drive.
More
recent versions of this drive embed a
flash SSD (instead
of HDD). The best way to think about this product is as a scaled down single
disk version of an SSD
accelerated RAID. It can significantly increase random IOPS for some types
of application - at a cost which nothing else comes close to (using SLC
flash technology). It's scalable too. Some DTS customers use these drives in
rackmount arrays.
This is the kind of product which requires extensive
benchmarking in the production environment in which it's going to be used. If
it's a good fit - then great. But actual speedup and competitiveness depends on
a variety of factors which are too difficult for most users to model. DTS says
it will ship a 2.5"
SSD which delivers about 40,000 IOPS later this month.
SandForce Publishes SSD Article in CTR
Editor:-
June 11, 2009 - SandForce's
VP marketing, Thad Omura published an article in Computer Technology Review called -
Making
MLC Flash Practical for Enterprise SSDs.
It's very superficial
(from the technical point of view) and says much less than the company already
said to our readers when they exited stealth mode in April.
See
also:- SSD
Controllers / IP,
Are MLC SSDs
Safe in Enterprise Apps?
the Most Popular Storage Products
Editor:- June 8,
2009 - StorageSearch.com
today published a new article -
the Most Popular
Products on StorageSearch.com
What can we learn about changes in
the
storage market and the
changing interests of readers by looking at how the most popular storage
products viewed by our readers have changed in recent years?
I
couldn't remember what these products were. And I didn't know the answer. So I
delved into the log files. That revealed some trends which seem obvious now -
but which I hadn't consciously noticed before. It's not a surprise they're all
SSDs. ...read
the article |
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| Fusion-io
will Offer Consumers PCIe SSD Accelerators |
| Editor:- June 2, 2009 - Fusion-io announced
it will ship a consumer
optimized version of its enterprise PCIe SSD family in July. |
Priced at
$895, the ioXtreme has
80GB
MLC flash capacity and
average throughput of 520MB/s.
Supported
OS's include:-
Windows XP, Vista and Linux. |
.. |
 | |
Editor's comments:-
the ioXtreme marketing package ends the confusion about the blurring boundaries
in the PCIe SSD market
between enterprise SSDs and pro consumers. This product has been optimized for
the consumer market.
- Out goes expensive SLC
flash (consumers don't need it - although most
enterprise apps
do). MLC is less than 1/2 the price of SLC for the same capacity (and that
gap is widening).
- Toss out 80% of the capacity (and memory cost) which you'd find in a
single slot enterprise card too. A single user doesn't need it.
- Winding down the performance from an enterprise class product like
Fusion-io's ioDrive Duo (1.4GB/s
R/W) to about 1/3 of that saves a bundle on fast glue hardware. It makes the
cache memory cheaper. The SSD controller processor can run slower and you
don't need onboard RAID logic (or if you do - it can be cheaper).
Those
kinds of value optimized decisions can lead you to a product like the
ioXtreme - which is still many times faster than any
2.5" SSD and
satisfies speed hungry consumer budgets without cannibalizing sales to
enterprise customers. It's a clever marketing move and I'm sure it will attract
huge interest.
...Later:- June 4, 2009 - Fusion-io confirmed today that the new
ioXtreme does in fact have their
Flashback chip level
protection and that you can run 2 cards in a
RAID configuration.
SanDisk Ships New DOM for Netbooks
Editor:- June 2,
2009 - SanDisk
started shipping its 2nd generation of PATA compatible
SSD
modules for the netbook market.
Performance of SanDisk's new
pSSD is 9,000 vRPM and capacities range from 8 to 64GB. SanDisk says it has
improved the non volatile cache to prevent "stalling" or "shuddering"
which was a problem in 1st generation netbook SSDs.
|
Storage clairvoyants,
IDC, project
consumer
purchases of netbooks to
rise from 11.5 million sold in 2008
to 50
million in 2013. |
.. |
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Editor's comments:- 27
companies make
miniature SSDs under 1.0"
in size. pSSD is simply a brand name of this SSD family from SanDisk -
and not new SSD jargon
term you need to know about. The traditional term for this type of product
is a DOM (disk on module). A SanDisk document describing the
1st
generation pSSD said the benefits were low cost and low weight - 1/10th
the weight that of a typical 1.8"
HDD.
Texas Memory Systems Teams with IBM to Boost Storage Performance
Editor:-
June 2, 2009 - Texas
Memory Systems
today
announced its RamSan-500
rackmount SSD system has been certified interoperable with
IBM's
System Storage SVC.
SMART Enters PCIe SSD Market
Editor:- June 1, 2009
- SMART Modular
Technologies disclosed it had used Marvell's
SSD controller in
SMART's new XceedIOPS
PCIe SSD which offers
upto 400GB capacity and 140,000 random IOPS performance. |
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| OEMs Race
to Design Their Own SSDs |
Editor:- May 27, 2009 - StorageSearch.com
disclosed today that search volume for
SSD SoCs (systems on a
chip and controllers) has overtaken
1" SSDs (includes
miniature SSD modules) this month for the first time.
Guess that
confirms my sneaking suspicion that a lot of oems want to
design their own
SSDs. | |
|
| PhotoFast
Announces Faster 1.8" Notebook SSDs |
| Editor:- May 27,
2009 - PhotoFast
launched its G-Monster 1.8"
SATA SSD with
internal 64MB DRAM cache
and upto 128GB capacity. |
| .................................................................. |
.. |
 |
| It supports R/W speeds upto
230MB/s and 160MB/s respectively. The company says - what's important in this
type of notebook product is not just sequential R/W throughput for large blocks
- but also write performance for small random blocks. It claims its 12MB/s (for
4KB blocks) is best in class. |
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