SSD Market
History
the
SSD Buyers Guide
Top 100 SSD
articles on StorageSearch.com - updated monthly
. |
| articles
about Solid State Disks on STORAGEsearch.com |
3 Easy Ways to Enter
the SSD Market
Nowadays it seems like everyone wants to get into
the SSD market. This article tells you how to do it.
Top 10 SSD oems
There are hundreds of SSD oems. Which ones matter? Who's going to dominate this
market in the future? There's already a lot of traction as you can see by
comparing which companies have consistently remained in the top 10 list in the
past 26 quarters.
the Fastest
Solid State Disks
Speed isn't everything, and it comes at a price.
But if you need the speediest SSD then wading through the web sites of over 150
current SSD oems to find a suitable candidate slows you down. 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.
Are MLC
SSDs Ever Safe in Enterprise Apps?
Looks at the risks posed by
the new generation of MLC Flash SSDs.
RAM
versus Flash SSDs - which is Best?
Leading experts discuss the
state of the market in the war for the datacenter core
Flash
vs DRAM Price Projections - for SSD Buyers
Rackmount SSDs are
big ticket investments for users. And in choosing between
RAM SSDs and
flash SSDs
knowing what's going to happen to the price gap is an important thing to know.
SSD
Myths and Legends - "write endurance"
Does
the fatal gene of "write endurance" built into
flash
solid state
disks prevent their deployment in intensive server acceleration
applications? It was certainly true as little as a few years ago. What's the
risk with today's devices? This article looks at the current generation of
products and calculates how much (or how little) you should be worried.
Can you trust
your flash SSD specs?
The product which you carefully qualified
may not be identical to the one that's going into your production line, because
the SSD oem has "improved" it. But the improvement makes another
operating parameter - which you deeply care about - unacceptably worse.
Data Recovery
from Flash SSDs?
The
flash SSD market
is fragmented on the issue of data recovery. When millions of SSDs start to
appear in notebooks - data recovery from a system which has not been backed up
correctly - will become a big issue - and opportunity for some companies.
2009 -
Year of SSD Market Confusion
Reviews the main achievements and
failures in the SSD market in 2008 - and predicts the confusing shape of
things to come in 2009.
Is the
SSD Market Recession-Proof?
Identifies which types of SSD
products will be the most likely winners and losers if there is a recession and
IT spending slowdown in the 2nd half of 2008.
Hybrid
Storage Drives
Looks at winners, losers and maybes in the 3 types
of hybrid disk drives now available in the market, and includes a directory,
analyst roound-up and a rare apology from the editor for not publishing it
sooner.
Why
are Most Analysts Wrong About Solid State Disks?
Most
analysts and editors of other computer publications don't really understand the
solid state disk market. They show their ignorance and naivete by prefacing
every discussion of SSDs with a superficial analysis which compares the cost per
byte of storage between flash and hard disk drives. That's the wrong answer to
the wrong question. And it's far removed from why the SSD market is racing to
become a multi billion dollar market seemingly in blithe ignorance of the cost
per byte proposition.
This highly acclaimed article tells you what's
important to users and the main applications in which SSDs are already being
used and new applications where they will be used in the next 3 years.
Squeak!
- the Solid State Disks Buyers Guide
Annual guide updated in October 2007. Tables of products are updated
and revised daily between each annual revision of the narrative in the article.
What's changed in the market since last year. Who makes what? - 5 main tables
of SSDs grouped by form factor, interface and memory technology. Includes
indicative pricing.
See also:-
2006
SSD Guide,
2005
SSD Guide,
2004
SSD Guide /
2003
SSD Guide
Squeak!
- Who's Eating Whom in the Storage Market?
"Nasty little
flashy diskses are quietly scrunching away there taking juicy design slots. My
Precious."
Squeak!
- 3.5" Terabyte Solid State Disks with Gigabyte / Sec Performance
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
Squeak!
- How Solid is Hard Disk's Future?
What
impact will the fast growing solid
state disk market have on the overall
hard disk market? - is
a question I've been asked a lot recently. Most of the
articles published
here on STORAGEsearch.com are
written from the SSD perspective. Is SSDs' gain really HDs' loss? - In some
segments yes. But it's not a zero sum game.
article:-
Understanding Flash SSD Performance (pdf)
This
article compares in detail read / write performance and IOPs of commercial
flash SSDs
compared to hard disks.
Explaining why the write cycle can become a bottleneck in FSSDs - the article
outlines EasyCo's patent pending approach in managing arrays of flash which
results in over 100x faster random write IOPs.
Article related
vendor:- EasyCo
article:-
Noise Damping Techniques for PATA SSDs in Military-Embedded Systems (pdf)
This article looks at electronic signal integrity
issues in integrating high speed PATA SSDs. It helps electronic designers
understand how factors such as ground bounce, loading, power supply noise and
signal trace mismatches can lead to false data or even device damage. Examples
given in the tutorial style commentary include scope shots and logic analyzer
traces.
Article related vendor:-
SiliconSystems
article:-
STORAGEsearch.com Solid State Disk Buyer Market Survey Results
STORAGEsearch has been
charting the
rise of the Solid State Disk Market for a number of years. In Q4 2004 we ran
the industry's first major market survey designed to learn more about buyers
needs and preferences. This article provides a summary of highlights from the
survey results. The survey has identified technical gaps which require new
product solutions and service gaps which require changes in the marketing plans
of SSD vendors who need to change the way they do business. SSD vendors must
take note of the signals flagged in this survey if they wish to transform
this market segment from a niche technical market into a mainstream multi
billion dollar pillar of the storage market.
article:- Solid
State Disks - a $10 Billion Market in 2007?
"The
SSD accelerator market should be viewed as a replacement for part of the server
CPU market. Not as a percentage of storage spend."
...Later:- I first published the above article in 2003. The
propositions in the article appear entirely correct 3 years later (in Q4 2006).
Many leading SSD oems have adopted the change paradigms I first voiced in that
article - and I have discussed these issues with every leading SSD company. My
timing may have been optimistic - by about one year.
article:-
Increasing Flash Solid State Disk Reliability
Solid
state disks, based on flash technology, have greatly improved in performance in
recent years and now compete head to head with RAM based accelerator systems.
Flash also has significant advatanges in servers compared to RAM SSDs due to low
power consumption. But if you think that all solid state disks which use flash
are equally reliable and enduring then think again. That's a bit like saying
that a Mercedes 300SL sports coupe is as tough as a Tiger tank because both
were made in Germany and both are built out of metal. But as Oddball (Donald
Sutherland) says in the movie
Kelly's
Heroes "I ain't messing with no Tigers." This article by
SiliconSystems,
shows how their patented architecture cleverly manages the wear out mechanisms
inherent in all flash media to deliver a disk lifetime that is about 4 times
greater than of other enterprise flash products and upto 100 times greater than
intrinsic flash memory.
article:-
War of the Disks: Hard Disk Drives vs. Flash Solid State Disks - by BiTMICRO
Editor's intro:- BiTMICRO is a well recognised
brand of SSDs (source
STORAGEsearch.com SSD
Survey) and they have published a lot of
articles to help
customers understand the benefits of their products. When I first saw the
submission for this article I was pleased to see that it quoted extracts from
and linked to several other articles that I myself had written or edited - so
that gave me a warm glow. After years of analyzing this market SSD vendors and
analysts are starting to see some clear patterns emerging. Although opinions
still differ on some subjects, and vendors are prone to pitch their own
solutions as best, this article is a useful synthesis of current industry
thinking by one of the leading flash SSD module manufacturers.
Article
related vendor:- BiTMICRO
Networks
article:-
Solid State Disks: Pushing the Envelope in Blade Server Design
Editor's intro:- With ten times lower power
consumption than hard drives and around 100x faster IOPS performance, the author
makes a case for using flash solid state disks in SBCs / Blades.
Article
related vendor:- BiTMICRO
Networks
case study:-
SSD Speeds Up Eve Online Science Fiction Game 40x
With
17,000 concurrent users playing the online SF game Eve players were becoming
frustrated as frequently accessed features were taking up to 20 seconds to
load. The game uses SQL technology and runs on 150 IBM servers running
Windows. The customer had no previous experience with SSDs, but found the
installation simple and quick. Users are ecstatic about the results. The system
which TMS supplied for this application, provided a 40x speedup, and
has a list price (Q405) of $142,000.
Article related vendor:-
Texas Memory Systems
article:-
Out of the Alpha Frying Pan into the Sun Fire?
It
ain't necessarily so.... Solid State Disks Can Prolong the Life and Accelerate
the Performance of the Last HP Alpha Processors. This article also includes a
priced case study in which a $3,000 (Q405 oem pricing) solid state disk
significantly speeded up the response time in a VMS Cluster utilized by almost
25,000 users.
case study:-
SSD Halves Response Time on 30 million Customer Telco Database (Word)
" The customer, the GuangDong Branch of China
Mobile is the biggest provincial branch in the Chinese Telecom industry, with
over 30 million users. Their MIS system relies on real-time, accurate
data for efficient employee, finance and material resource management. Increased
demands meant that the performance needed to be accelerated. They made their
selection after testing and turning down fast RAID devices. The Nitro SSD
seamlessly installed into GuangDong Branch of China Mobile's SUN environment,
including SUN Fire6800 Servers, SUN StorEdge6120 RAID storage, and Oracle RDBMS
application."
Article related vendor:-
Curtis
article:-
Charting the Rise of the Solid State Disk Market
According
to Clayton M. Christensen ( "The Innovator's Dilemma - published 1997")
in the early phase of disruptive markets there is little or no reliable market
data. That's because the markets are too small to attract the investment of
traditional market research companies which are funded by the "usual
suspects" - IBM, HP, Dell etc. STORAGEsearch was the first publication to
note the emergence of SSDs as a breakthrough technology into the commercial
server market. This article was originally published on our main SSD page in
July 2003 and includes a commentary of critical marketing events since that
time right up to the present day.
article:-
Flash Solid State Disks - Inferior Technology or Closet Superstar?
"A general perception in the computing industry
is that only DRAM is robust enough for enterprise use. That sentiment doesn't
give enough credit to flash memory."
Article related vendor:-
BiTMICRO Networks
article:- Eurex
US Derivatives - a Solid State Disk Case Study (pdf)
"Deutsche
Börse Systems sought to augment server operations by adding solid state
disk to the time critical processing environment in Chicago."
Article
related vendor:- Dynamic
Solutions International
article:-
Using Solid State Disks to Boost Legacy RAID and Database Performance
Adding a solid state disk to inter-operate with an
existing RAID storage system can be like sprinkling fairy dust which makes
everything go faster. That's often cheaper and more effective than upgrading
servers and licenses or replacing existing storage.
Article related
vendor:-
Texas Memory Systems
article:-
Rugged & Reliable Data Storage: Solid-State Flash Disks overview
"Based on flash technology, solid-state flash
disks are becoming common data storage within military and airborne systems,
telecommunication infrastructure and factory automation systems as they offer
significantly higher reliability and a maintenance free solution than
traditional mechanical disks."
Article related vendor:-
M-Systems
article:- Why
Upgrade Your Servers? - SSDs Provide Superior ROI for a Bank - Case Study
(pdf)
"Bar Harbor Banking and Trust
initially suspected that they needed more processing power. However, analysis
revealed that they were suffering from I/O bottlenecks."
Article
related vendor:- Dynamic
Solutions International
article:-
Faster Oracle Database Access with the RamSan-210
"One
of the first things that most IT shops do when performance wanes, is to add
processors to servers or add servers to server farms.... In many cases, these
likely sources for database performance problems are just masking the true cause
of poor database performance: the gap between processor performance and storage
performance."
Article related vendor:-
Texas Memory Systems
article:-
Tuning SANs with Solid State Disks
"Regardless
of the interconnect employed, servers cannot approach the almost limitless
capabilities of today's SSD devices."
Article related vendor:-
Imperial Technology
article:-
Accelerating Key Application Performance (pdf)
"Monster.com
moved its most heavily accessed "hot" files from HDD RAID storage to a
pair of 16-GB SSD units. The results included a 30% reduction in query time, a
50% improvement in database indexing time and the ability of existing servers
to handle 25% more simultaneous users."
Article related vendor:-
Platypus Technology
article:- Solid
State File-Caching for Performance and Scalability
"After
the message queues were moved to a solid-state file cache, the Sun server was
able to process four times as many messages per second. The ISP was able to
scale the application by increasing the throughput of each server, rather than
buying four times as many servers and managing a more complex hardware
environment."
Article related vendor:-
Solid Data Systems
article:-
Flash Memory vs. Hard Disk Drives - Which Will Win? - by Semico Research
There's a confusing picture in many consumer
products like phones, cameras and music players in which one day it seems that
the storage function is done by flash and next day another company announces
they're doing the same thing with miniature hard disks. Is there any sense to
this seemingly random choice? This article uses pricing trends, technology
trends and unique market analysis insights to show that users and oems may be
able to reliably predict which storage devices will be most cost effective
depending where you are on the future history curve.
Article by
market research company:-
Semico Research |
|
|
| articles
about Solid State Disks on other sites |
Flash
SSD Data Reliability and Lifetime (pdf)
Starting from a
description of floating gates and going all the way up to the architecture of a
flash SSD this paper written by Alan R. Olson & Denis J. Langlois at
Imation includes good
descriptions of data failure modes, including:- erase failure, (erase) stress
induced long term leakage, disturb faults, and the potential for inadequate
error correction code coverage in MLC.
SSDs
in Enterprise Storage (pdf)
This paper by Hubbert Smith Director,
Enterprise Storage Marketing
Samsung Electronics
includes interesting graphs which compare the IOPS per dollar and IOPS per watt
of 2.5" and 3.5" hard drives compared with flash SSDs.
Design
Tradeoffs for (SLC flash) SSD Performance (pdf)
by Nitin Agrawal,
Vijayan Prabhakaran, Ted Wobber, John D. Davis, Mark Manasse and Rina Panigrahy
looks in detail at the internal architecture of a typical commercially available
SLC flash SSD and the various points where different types of software
algorithms can impact performance.
New
Equations for Measuring the Value of High Performance Storage (pdf)
By
Tomas Havrda and Chas Chesler,
Solid Access
Technologies, this paper compares the rack height, electrical power and
price to achieve identical IOPS using
RAM SSDs and
hard disks.
Does
Serial Attached SCSI make sense for Solid State Storage? (pdf)
Esther
Spanjer, Director of Technical Marketing at
Adtron weighs up the
different reliability and performance benefits of SAS for HDDs and SSDs.
Is
All CompactFlash Really Created Equal? (pdf)
Written by Mark
Downey, Director of Strategic Development
White Electronic Designs
this article analyzes the critical differences between consumer and high
reliability grade flash SSDs when used in medical instrumentation.
presentation:-
Solid State Drives Moving into Design (pdf)
Written
by Y.R. Kim Director, Technical Marketing
Samsung Electronics for
the Flash Memory Summit in
August 2007 - this 30 page document summarises Samsung's thinking re the case
for flash SSDs in
notebooks and describes the internal architecture of their SSD products. Also
includes a detailed discussion of flash endurance and overall SSD performance
relative to notebook hard
disks.
case
study:- iGLASS Improves Response Times with SAS SSD (pdf)
"Many customers are on the fence when budgeting and
assessing SSD implementation. However, they evaluate the wrong metric, looking
at cost per GB storage capacity when the relevant metric should be cost per
IOPS."
iGLASS Networks
monitors over 7 million servers / devices in real-time for its own customers.
By using Solid Access Technologies'
SAS connected
SSD iGLASS was able to
reduce the number of of data gathering servers from 7 down to 4 and improve
reliability while speeding up the generation of reports to its customers.
Article related vendors:-
Solid Access
Technologies ,
LSI Logic
article:-
SSDs - by Rich Tehrani
This article discusses the
benefits of having a quieter notebook PC in your hotel room when you try to go
to sleep. Incidentally - the same arguments apply to SSDs in submarines.
article:-
Solid State Technology – Where Does it Fit for Customer Applications? (pdf)
"Applications don't want IOPS • They want time
(less is better)"
Article related vendor:-
Xiotech
article:-
Why disks are obsolete
"When you figure disk
capacity in the last 20 years has gone from 30 megabytes on a hard drive to
300-500 gigabytes (a factor of 17,067 increase) while disk transfer rates have
only gone up by a factor of 20 or so it isn't hard to see why people have
difficulty specifying their disk systems in a meaningful way."
article:-
Windows PC Accelerators - How Windows Vista Supports Solid State Disks
"Microsoft research has shown that demand paging-a
method for implementing virtual memory that involves swapping pages of data
between disk storage and main memory as they're needed-is a key contributor to
poor performance. Demand paging generates many requests to the disk and creates
a usage pattern that resembles random disk I/O, with long latencies caused by
seeks on the disk." The Windows PC Accelerators in Vista analyze usage
patterns and automatically manage solid state disk caching.
Article related vendor:-
Microsoft
article:-
Solid State Disks - intro, applications & FAQs
"Video
Processing – SSDs are used for video streaming applications that require
real time editing and processing."
Article related vendor:-
Curtis
article:-
Why Sun Should Acquire a Solid State Disk Company
"Sun's
chip designers aren't in the first league when it comes to processor design -
but adding SSD support to Sun's Solaris operating system could enable Sun's
SPARC and Opteron servers to run faster than the Linux and Windows competition."
article:-
Accelerated Life Testing Reliability Verification for Adtron Fllash Disks (pdf)
Over
6 years ago
Adtron took a bunch of
their flash SSDs and subjected them to accelerated ageing at high temperature.
The article discusses the theoretical failure mechanisms in this type of
storage. "Adtron predicted 28 years, of life under normal operating
conditions and this accelerated life test validates these predictions."
article:-
Are solid-state drives really better than hard disks?
The first
version of the SSD MacBook Air disappointed many with its dull performance.
This article says that part of the problem lies in the fact that operating
systems have been optimized to deal with the quirky requirements of hard drives,
and this means they fail to operate optimally with flash SSDs - even if the SSDs
are "faster".
article:-
Storage Hierarchy Management for Scientific Computing - by Ethan Leo Miller
(pdf)
Editor's note:- this dissertation paper
(written in 1995 by Ethan Leo Miller as part of a Phd program) is the earliest
published example I have found which correctly places SSDs within a
hierarchical storage model context.
article:-
SSD Speeds Compliance with U.S.A. Patriot Act - Case Study
Campus
USA Credit Union, with 70,000 members, had a VMS mainframe which could take upto
30 minutes to answer detailed customer queries. To comply with the US Patriot
Act and speed up real-time customer identification they turned to a solid state
disk accelerator from Dynamic Solutions International. As a result, mundane
queries that previously used to take 3 minutes to run on the old system, now
take about 8 seconds, while longer queries that used to take more than 30
minutes, now can be processed in five or six minutes.
Article related
vendor:- Dynamic Solutions
International
article:-
Hybrid Hard Disks and Beyond - extremetech.com
This
is a report from an IDEMA symposium (December 2005) in which vendors discussed
the attributes and feasibility of hybrid disk drives which combine
hard disks with
onboard flash.
article:-
Raytheon Speeds Up the Tolls on Canada's Highway 407 - Case Study
"The central portion of the toll-collection system
consists of two IBM RS/6000 model J40s with 756 megabytes of memory and 100
gigabytes of disks. Although this powerful system eliminates the delays of a
human toll booth attendant and the need of drivers to toss coins in a funnel, it
has limits. Each vehicle entering the toll road must be logged into the
computer so a charge can levied, and charges vary with the time of day. At peak
hours of toll road usage, the disks, limited by rotational and head-positioning
delays inherent to the technology, could not keep up with the pace of vehicles
entering the tollgates. Without a solution to this performance limitation,
either the entrance to the toll road had to be slowed down, creating a traffic
jam at the worst possible time, or the driver would get free access to the toll
road. Neither option was acceptable."
Article related vendor:-
Imperial Technology
article:-
University of Hull Eases Pain with Solid State Disks - Case Study (pdf)
"The University of Hull, in the UK, caters for over
17,000 full and part time students. The Authentication Service for students was
demanding and intensive on both CPU and Disk I/O. Despite several optimisation
projects which had limited success due to the constraints of the speed of the
disks, Max and his team wanted a long term solution that would increase speed
without compromising reliability."
Article related vendors:-
PlumExpress (UK VAR), Curtis
article:-
Getting More Bang for the Storage Buck
"Are
SSDs a viable alternative for price-conscious buyers who are running
performance-hungry OLTP apps? The objective of this article is to examine the
benefits of utilizing flash SSD-enabled storage system as cache storage in an
enterprise environment. A comparison will be made between conventional storage
systems (featuring HDDs) and solid-state disk-based network storage in terms of
performance and overall cost per IOPS."
Article related vendor:-
BiTMICRO Networks
article:- SSD Success
Stories - by Memtech
Editor:- From the depths of
Earth's oceans to the sands of Mars - Memtech's flash solid state disks have
been deployed in hostile applications where no other type of disk drive can
survive. A fascinating glimpse into the wild side of SSDs.
Article
related vendor:- Memtech
article:-
SSD v HDD - Comparing Server IOPs (pdf)
"Under
heavy random load, the performance of even today's fastest (15,000 RPM) hard
disks can be brought as low as 100 operations per second. ...An SSD today can
supply around 200,000 operations per second or 1,000 times that of a traditional
disk."
article:- The
Storage Performance Dilemma (pdf)
"Storage
can be considered as part of a pyramid-shaped hierarchy. Huge capacity storage
(low performance tape storage, cheap arrays of disks) are at the base of the
pyramid, medium capacity storage (Fibre Channel arrays) is in the middle, and
the low capacity solid state disk is at the top."
Article related
vendor:- Texas Memory
Systems
article:-
Solid-State Disks: Moving from Luxury to Necessity
"Today
we can buy a server with one or more 3GHz CPUs, and a number of hard disk drives
that still get about a 5ms access time. Do you know what the result of this is?
A CPU that idles along at under 20% utilization while I/O beats the disks to
death."
Article related vendor:-
BiTMICRO Networks
article:- Comparison of
Solid State Drives to SATA Drive Arrays for Use with Oracle - by Mike Aulton
"Over all, based on elapsed time, the SSD array
performed the queries 276 times faster than the ATA array. Note that this was
using the 30 hour limitation on the queries, had I waited for those long-running
queries to complete, the difference may have been much greater."
article:-
Understanding IOPS (pdf)
"Be wary of hardware
vendors that publish burst rates, as these are not sustainable in a realistic
high traffic environment. Similarly, many storage systems will publish high IOPS
rates "from cache," which cannot reflect real-world application
performance."
Article related vendor:-
Texas Memory Systems
article:-
Samsung's Solid State Disk Drive Unveiled - The Future of Things
More interesting than the actual article (published Dec
2006) is the reader dialog which follows. It includes a range of erudite and
ignorant comments - which SSD marketers would do well to consider. The state of
knowledge and misknowledge about SSDs requires a great deal of investment in
education about the technology and benefits.
article:-
FreeBSD and Solid State Devices
"This article
covers the use of solid state disk devices in FreeBSD to create embedded
systems."
article:-
Satisfying the Need for Speed in a SAN (pdf)
"When
a server accesses storage, a disk platter must rotate and a magnetic head must
move to the correct position to complete the read or write. This takes precious
time. An elegant and cost-effective means to bolster storage performance in a
SAN is to employ solid state disk technology."
Balancing
Server CPU & I/O with FlashDisk RAID
"Most
server jobs nowadays are unbalanced with the processors typically spending
90% of their time in I/O processing."
Article related vendor:-
Winchester Systems
article:-
Boosting Scalability for Citrix MetaFrame (pdf)
"When
the TiGiJet SSD device was added to Ushio's production environment scalability
immediately skyrocketed from just 17 concurrent users to 70. The servers were no
longer locking-up as they had been doing with many less users. In addition,
workers began experiencing better and more consistent performance on their
desktops. "We added four times as many users to each server and everything
ran better," said Strand.
Article related vendor:-
TiGi
article:-
FRAM Technology Backgrounder - by Ramtron (pdf)
In
the 2004 edition of the
Solid State Disks
Buyers Guide - we identified FRAM as a technology which might impact the SSD
market in a 5 year timeframe.
"Ferroelectric Random Access Memory
or FRAM has attributes that make it the ideal nonvolatile memory. It is a true
nonvolatile RAM. FRAM is a RAM-based device that uses the ferroelectric effect
for a storage mechanism. This is a completely different mechanism than the one
used by other nonvolatile memories, which use floating gate technology."
Article
related vendor:- Ramtron
case
study:- High Performance QFS with Solid State Disk Metadata Storage (pdf)
How a solid state disk system helped the San Diego Super
Computer Center speed up its SAN backup operation from 21 hours and 40 minutes
to just 34 minutes.
Article related vendor:-
Texas Memory Systems
(removed) article: - Alternatives to Using NAND Flash - by M-Systems
(pdf)
"Bit-Flipping - All flash architectures today suffer
from a phenomenon known as "bit-flipping". On some occasions (usually
rare, yet more common in NAND than in NOR), a bit is either reversed, or is
reported reversed. Although a single reversal may seem insignificant, this "minor"
glitch may hang your system completely if it corrupts a critical file. When the
problem is just of reporting, repeating the read operation may solve it;
however, if the bit was actually reversed, an error detection/correction
algorithm must be applied (as offered in the DiskOnChip®). Since this
phenomenon is more common in NAND devices, all NAND vendors recommend using an
EDC/ECC algorithm. When using NAND for multimedia information, this problem is
not critical, but when using it as a local storage device to store the system
OS, configuration files and other sensitive information, an EDC/ECC system MUST
be implemented."
Article related vendor:-
M-Systems
article:-
Memtech's drives take a beating - by David Morrill, InsideBayArea.com
"The devices also have been tested by magnetic fields
in mines and cold temperatures in areas like Antartica... The only condition a
Memtech device might not survive is a nuclear explosion. "It might melt
in a nuclear explosion. But if that happened, it wouldn't matter because nobody
would be around to get the data anyway.""
Article related
vendor:- Memtech
article:-
Solid State Disks in an Oracle Environment - by James A Morle, Scale Abilities
Ltd
"...The reality of most commercial (as
opposed to scientific) databases is that there is a very definite working set of
data that is much smaller than the total size of the database. If this set can
be identified, and operationally staged on the SSD, then 80% of the gain will be
realized with significantly lower cost than putting the whole database onto SSD."
article:-
Lower Your TCO With last Solid-State Disks - on FindArticles.com
"Solid-state disks have been around a long time and
have appeared in many different forms under many different names. The earliest
systems were known as mass memory systems (MMS), and were manufactured by a
number of prominent companies -- Dataram, Intel, Mostek, Motorola, National
Semiconductor, and Texas Memory Systems, to name a few. Most of these companies
believed that solid-state storage was the wave of the future and made
corresponding plans for tremendous market growth. Each of these companies
underestimated the price reduction that disk drives would achieve. The SSD
market turned out to be non-existent for all but some I/O intensive military
applications. Only Texas Memory Systems has remained in this market providing
SSDs to these military applications."
Article related vendor:-
Texas Memory Systems
article:-
Solid-state memory takes over in niche military and aerospace applications - on
Military & Aerospace Electronics
"Designers
of solid-state memory systems have made significant strides in recent years, not
only in increasing speed and density, but also in reducing costs. At the same
time, however, those designing mechanical bulk memory have made equally
significant advances in those same areas. As a result, the cost/performance
computation continues to be a serious factor as systems integrators determine
what kind of mass memory system they choose to implement in new programs, in
upgrades, or in retrofits."
article:-
Hard-driving Memtech in talks for possible merger - by Eric Lai, East Bay
Business Times
"Memtech has sold 30,000
drives since 1993, of which only a few dozen per year get returned due to
problems, according to Schuster. One Memtech drive that did not get returned
plunged 127,000 feet as part of a NASA weather balloon that crashed onto a
Virginia highway, where it was promptly run over by a truck. Despite being "totally
bent out of shape" the data was still accessible."
...Later:- 6 months after the above article was published
Memtech was acquired by
SimpleTech
SSD
articles - on Industrial Embedded Systems
There's
a bunch of articles here about
extending the
life of factory controllers by using SSDs instead of quickly obsolescing HDDs
(by Adtron),
speeding up database
transactions (by Solid
Data Systems) and
embedding
security into SSDs (by
SiliconSystems). |
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| the SSD Heresies |
| Editor:- June 11, 2010 - more
than 10 key areas of fundamental disagreement within the SSD industry are
listed in a recent article published here on StorageSearch.com -
the SSD Heresies. |
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... |
Why can't SSD's true believers agree about
a single coherent vision for the future of solid state storage? ...read the article | | |
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| What's the
best / cheapest - PC SSD? |
Editor:- May 14, 2010 - I
often get emails from readers which ask the above question.
An article
on
StorageSearch.com - called
What's the best
/ cheapest PC SSD? - is my attempt to create a simple FAQs page - which
answers the question... |
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...of why I can't answer
your question - and follows on to pose some probing questions which you
can ask yourself. ...read the article | | |
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| SSD Pricing -
where does all the money go? |
Editor:- January 27, 2010 -
SSDs are among the most
expensive computer hardware products you will ever buy.
Understanding
the factors which determine SSD costs is often a confusing and irritating
process... |
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...not made any easier when
market prices for identical capacity SSDs can vary more than 100x to 1!
Why is that? ...read
the article | | |
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| the Problem
with Write IOPS |
Editor:- December 16, 2009 -
StorageSearch.com today
published a new article -
the Problem with
Write IOPS - in flash SSDs.
Flash SSD "random write IOPS"
are now similar to "read IOPS" in many of the
fastest SSDs. So
why are they such a poor predictor of application performance?
And
why are users still buying
RAM SSDs which cost
9x more than SLC? - even when the IOPS specs look similar. |
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This new article tells you
why the specs got faster - but the applications didn't. And why competing SSDs
with apparently identical benchmark results can perform completely
differently. ...read
the article | | |
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| Fast Purge
flash SSDs - when "Rugged SSDs" won't do |
Editor:- September 25, 2009 -
StorageSearch.com today
published a new directory of Fast Purge flash SSDs.
The
need for fast and secure data erase - in which vital parts of a flash SSD or
its data are destroyed in seconds - has always been a requirement in military
projects. |
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Although many industrial
SSD vendors are offering their products with extended "rugged"
operating environment capabilities - it's the availability of fast purge which
differentiates "true military" SSDs which can be deployed in
defense applications.
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| Why
Consumers Can Expect More Flaky Flash SSDs! |
Editor:- August 10, 2009 - a
new article published today on the home page of 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 | |
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| The New
Skinny on flash SSDs |
| Editor:- July 28, 2009 - StorageSearch.com today published
an article -
RAM Cache Ratios
in flash SSDs - which proposes new terms to describe and differentiate
products in the flash SSD market. |
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It is hoped that the new
classification jargon will be useful to users who have to evaluate lots of
products, and will be useful to vendors as a shorthand when communicating
about different segments within their flash SSD product lines. ...read the article | | |
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| Notebook
SSD Market Overview |
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. |
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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
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| Debunking
Tier 0 Storage Babble |
Editor:- May 18, 2009 - in a
new article published today on StorageSearch.com
I explain why - I
Tire of - "Tier Zero Storage"
You don't need to waste
any of your precious brain cells by investing "tier 0 storage" with an
importance this travesty of storage jargon really doesn't deserve.
...read the
article | |
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How Bad is - Choosing the
Wrong SSD Supplier?
Editor:- March 24, 2009 - I've published a
article called -
How Bad is - Choosing
the Wrong SSD Supplier?
I've spoken to countless
VCs, oems and
end-users about how difficult it is to know you've got the best
SSD company in your sights
as a potential acquisition
target, supplier or technology partner. If you know what you're doing - it takes
time. And in the past 9 weeks while you've been doing that - another 30 new
companies have entered the SSD market to make things more complicated. It's a
big decision. How big a deal - if you decide later - it was the wrong choice?
Trust me. We live in difficult times. The vampires are coming. If the
pointy stick breaks you
may not get another chance. ...read the article | |
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| flash SSD
Jargon Explained
|
Editor:- February 25, 2009 -
understanding the list of ingredients inside flash SSDs - is as important
as knowing what you can do with them - and
a new article published
today on
StorageSearch.com tries to hit this fast moving target.
"Just
as some foods are healthier than others - so too some SSDs are better suited
for particular applications" says editor Zsolt Kerekes.
"Better
user education about SSDs is a critical factor for the industry to sustain its
growth. Design tradeoffs in products go far deeper than the choice of memory
and interface. Being aware that there are other parameters which SSD vendors
have implemented well, badly (or not at all) can be the difference between a
satisfactory or disillusionary experience." ...read the article | |
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| New
Directory - Serial SCSI SSDs |
Editor:- January 26, 2009 -
StorageSearch.com today
published a new article and directory on the subject of
SAS SSDs.
This market has been a long time acoming - and for many years there were only 1
or 2 vendors in the market. The new article chronicles the genesis of
SAS SSDs and lists
known vendors - which will head into double digits this year. | |
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| A New
Methodology for Realistically Predicting Flash SSD Reliability
|
Editor:-
December 15, 2008 - Gary Drossel, VP Product Planning at SiliconSystems
has written a new article - "NAND Evolution and its Effects on SSD
Useable Life."
This is probably one of the 3 most
significant articles on the subject of
flash SSD
reliability which have been published in recent years. Starting with a tour of
the state of the art in the flash SSD market and technology the paper
introduces several new concepts to help systems designers understand why
current wear usage models don't give a complete picture.
The paper discusses the theoretical expected lifetimes and
amplification factors for several applications and concludes that measurement
of wear-out in real applications is the best way to understand what is
happening. It suggests that systems designers can use the company's SiliconDrive
(which includes real-time on-chip endurance monitoring) as an endurance
analysis design tool. By simply plugging in SiliconDrive(s) to a new
application for a day, week or month - the percentage of wear-out can be
measured - and corrective steps taken (in software design or overprovisioning)
to correct reliability problems.
What isn't stated in the article -
but is a logical inference - is that even if your product design goal is to
buy SSDs from other oems - the SiliconDrives can be used in your design process
to capture information in a non invasive manner which is difficult or
impossible to collect using other instrumentation. ...read the
article (pdf), ...SiliconSystems
profile, storage
reliability | |
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| SSD Market's First Century |
Editor:- November 14, 2008 -
a year ago I predicted that the total number of active
SSD oems would reach 100
by the close of 2008.
With 6 weeks still to go - and the current count
at 91 - it looks like that first SSD century will easily be achieved.
What
about next year?
The potential market for
rackmount SSD
arrays will look very attractive compared to other parts of the storage market
which may level off or decline. That could attract hundreds of recession hungry
manufacturers who are currently making
RAID systems or
NAS and create a tsunami
of confusion for buyers of enterprise SSDs.
But here's a warning...
Just as many of today's 2.5" flash SSDs are me-too products
(which simply bolted a hard disk interface chip design to a weakly designed
media controller and a bunch of flash memory) so too will many "new"
SSD rackmounts simply be rehashed
boxes which were
originally designed for hard
drives. So although performance will be adequate - it will be far below
the state of the art.
News stories speculating about companies
entering the SSD market in 2009 are daily events - and not worth reporting any
more on these pages until said Johnny-come-latelies actually do something more
solid about solid state drives than talk to the media.
In the same
category are stories from oems saying they will produce "faster" SSDs
in 2009.
No oem has yet promised to ship slower devices next year.
Now that would be newsworthy!
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| Flash SSD
Performance Roadmap |
Editor:- April 17, 2008 -
STORAGEsearch.com published a new article today called - the Flash SSD
Performance Roadmap.
A few weeks ago a reader asked 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? or 2012? What are the technology factors which
relate to throughput and IOPS? And how much faster will they be than today.
There wasn't a simple answer I could give at the time. Clues lay
scattered all across this web site
and in my many discussions 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 | |
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| Hybrid Hard
Drives Market Report |
Los
Gatos, CA - December 19, 2007 - The Hybrid Hard Drive will not make a big
splash in 2008, according to a new 36-page report by Objective Analysis.
PC users who are waiting for this technology to speed their boot
times are going to have to wait a little longer.
"Once all the kinks are ironed out, hybrid drives and their
counterparts should sweep the market," said Jim Handy, the report's author.
"Unfortunately, the hardware is ready but the software support is weak.
Hybrid drives will have to wait for better support to justify their small
additional cost."
Hybrid Hard Drives: How, Why, And When? - is an in-depth review of
the hybrid hard drive market, exploring the technology, implementation costs,
and expected benefits, as it explains why those benefits are not within reach
today.
...Objective
Analysis profile
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| 2007 -
Year of SSD Revolutions? |
One of the few dates I
can remember from studying European history (at the age of 16) was 1848.
1848
was
the Year of
Revolutions...
I don't think we did any dates before that. And due
to lack of time - we didn't quite finish the syllabus and reach the other end of
this historical slice - which was 1945. I think we only got as far as 1933
before the exams crept up on us.
The definition of "Europe"
in that academic context meant "continental Europe" and axiomatically
excluded the UK - as England (where the exams took place) was naturally not
considered to be a part of Europe.
As I found in later years there
are plenty of things that have happened in the world before and after these
magic dates - and most of these events have taken place outside the continent of
Europe (whichever definition of the old world you choose). But one benefit of
my history education has been that I've enjoyed many long hours reading about
history - since leaving school - without the narrative plot having been spoiled
by a fore-knowledge of what happened next.
Similarly with my knowledge
of English literature. When I am occasionally dragged to
Stratford upon Avon
to see a new production by the
Royal Shakespeare Company - I know that -
as long as it's not that one play we did for the exams - I don't know the plot -
or even whether it's supposed to be a comedy or tragedy - and I can enjoy it (or
not) without any previous prejudice.
But back to the Year of
Revolutions.
2007 is shaping up to be the Year of Revolutions
in the
Solid State Disk market.
Although
I've been expecting something like this for many years the new
SSD technology
announcements in the past year have included many twists and revolutionary
changes which will break down the barriers which once separated different
segments of this market.
The old
obsolete price
comparisons between hard
disk and flash SSD
pricing sound as ridiculous today as
dinosaur print
media executives who still talk about the internet as "new media".
As I said to one reader this week "Hard disk pricing is
irrelevant for many parts of the enterprise SSD market." Even if hard
disks were free - users will switch to SSDs if they have the right type
of applications - because the alternative cost of managing more servers,
swapping out failed disks, electrical power and data center floor space are too
high - or technically unfeasible.
The real battle in the enterprise
server market in the next few years will be internecine...
"RAM versus Flash
SSDs - which is Best?"
I invited the world's leading experts
to contribute to an article on this subject which was published August 20, 2007. | |
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STORAGEsearch.com
Publishes 2.5" SSD Guide
Editor:- June 13, 2007 - STORAGEsearch.com
today published a new directory of 2.5" solid state disks.
It
provides a summary and quick links to nearly 100 SSD models from 23 oems
actively marketing SSDs in the 2.5 inch form factor, including new products
launched today.
The 2.5 inch form factor is the hottest part of the
solid state disk market -
with new oems entering the market every couple of weeks in the first half of
2007. At stake are multibillion dollar market segments for 3 of the 4 primary
applications described in detail in our
SSD Market
Adoption Model. These will add up to a $10 billion / year SSD market within
a few years. The 2.5" form factor is the only size which straddles the
wide range of SSD application slots. ...read the article |
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Why I was
Wrong About SSD Growth.... It will be Very Much Faster
Editor:-
December 7, 2006 - although 2006 has been a very good year for revenue growth in
the SSD market - next year will be even better.
SSD market adoption has
progressed pretty much as predicted in my
article
last year. And those predictions about applications look just as accurate for
the next couple of years too. But as we start to see SSDs appearing more widely
in products - there are some factors which may accelerate the take-up beyond
what might be predicted from preliminary performance predictions.
For
example - in the notebook market - flash vendors have predicted that SSDs will
give an application speedup of x2 to x3. Those figures are based on comparing
the theoretical performance of low cost flash SSDs compared to
hard disk drives, and
are backed up by early measurements done by product developers.
What
the figures don't tell you is that the comparisons are done for new systems
with a freshly loaded squeaky clean OS and application software. Real life is
more messy.
If you fast forward a couple of months and end-users start
doing software updates - the effect of fragmentation will slow the performance
of the HDD based systems down by a factor of x2 to x7 depending on the
application and the interval between defrags (which is rarely - if ever
performed on most personal notebooks).
In contrast - the speed of the
SSD systems stays the same as it was when the system was new - because the
random access time is the same for all data - and fragmentation effects are
effectively zero.
The impact is that when you compare a 3 month old
Vista notebook with or without an SSD - the difference in speed could be as
much as x5 or x10.
This only applies to notebooks
which have pure SSDs and the benefit won't apply to hybrids.
I predict
that once users have eyeballed the comparisons in real-life - the flash based
SSD sales will soar. Pressure from users on their corporate IT managers to throw
out the old HDD based notebooks will create a tsunami of demand as
strong as that which led to companies originally buying PCs back in the early
80s.
Am I right? - Keep bookmarked to this page - and you'll see. | | |
