the SSD Buyers Guide - click to see article


SSD controller chips	..


the SSD Bookmarks	..

storagesearch.com


...	Megabyte's ancestor, Sir Squeaks-a-Bit had come over to England in 1066 with William the Conquerer's ship in a barrel of Normandy cheese.

...	More "History" Articles SSD History InfiniBand History Storage Events History SAN History - 1st Decade Disk to Disk Backup History "Gone away" storage companies Storage Banner Ads from the Vault Sun SPARC History - 1987 to today

Flashbacks from SPARC History

4 years ago - June 2005 - Sun Acquires StorageTek

It looked like a clever move by Sun, whose earlier go it alone storage forays had mostly ended as expensive mistakes. But Sun paid too much and did too little, too late in the fastest growing part of the storage market - SSDs.

5 years ago - June 2004 - Fujitsu's 1.9 GHz SPARC Processor

For many years Sun didn't know how to design the fastest SPARC processors, and Fujitsu didn't know how to market them. Eventually the dynamic duo did some collaborative sounding partnerships. But by then most server buyers had lost interest.

6 years ago - June 2003 - Appeal Court Says Microsoft Doesn't Have to Distribute Java

By this time it was clear that Microsoft was going to overtake Sun in the server OS market, so there was no need to pander to a rival on its way down.

8 years ago - June 2001 - Tatung Announces Small Form Factor UltraSPARC III Server

Tatung had been an active SPARC oem for 10 years. This was one of the last SPARC product announcements from the company.

9 years ago - June 2000 - Sun Maintains Commanding Lead in UNIX Server Market

IDC reported that... "Sun shipped 2x as many UNIX servers as HP and nearly 3x as many as IBM - ending the quarter with a resounding 38%. It was the 12th consecutive quarter that Sun led in UNIX server shipments. Sun was also #1 in UNIX server revenue with 32% market share."

Could that happen again? Although it seems unlikely today, never say never. There's a revolution going in in computer architecture, such as we haven't seen for nearly 20 years, and no assumptions are safe.

Classic Storage Articles - from Storage History

Sometimes we've published articles here on StorageSearch.com which set the tone for massive changes in the storage market.

And the best of these articles still remain popular many years later. Here are some examples.

SAN Applications - published in 1999 was the first to integrate ideas about the new possibilities of "storage area networks".

A Storage Architecture Guide - published in 2000 - paved the way for new thinking about NAS.

SSD Market Adoption Model - 1st published in 2003 - described how SSDs would become a 10 billion dollar / year market.

SATA Raids the Datacenter - published in 2004 proposed that market segregation of hard drives into "enterprise" and "consumer" HDDs by interface type was a mythical barrier that would soon break down.

Can You Trust Your Flash SSD's Specs?

Editor:- Something I've noticed is that the published specs of flash SSDs change a lot -from the time they are first announced, then when they're being sampled, and later again when they are in volume production.

Sometimes the headline numbers get better, sometimes they get worse. There are many good reasons for this.

The product which you carefully qualified may not be identical to the one that's going into your production line for a variety of reasons... ...read the article

Are MLC SSDs Ever Safe in Enterprise Apps?

This is a follow up article (published in March 2008) 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.

which technology to choose? - read the article

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

Squeak! - Animal Brands and Metaphors in the Storage Market

Animal marketing metaphors are popular in service industries, but you'd be surprised how many companies have used animals in their marketing of data storage products and services. The storage market was worth over $150 billion in 2005, and as it gets bigger - more companies will turn to animal brands to help differentiate their otherwise bland products and lend them artificial (or deserving) characters and virtues.

The idea behind this type of marketing is to suggest positive connotations so it's unlikely that anyone will choose to associate their products with gremlins. But you may be surprised by the population of the storage ark.

This reference articles lists all known companies who have furry marketing brands, and also includes some which are slimy, scaly and scary too. ...read the article, Mice in storage

SPARC History

Spellabyte and Terrorbyte loved sitting around
the campfire, discussing the good old days of
SPARC computing.

Megabyte's Ancestor - Sir Squeaks-a-Bit - the Unexpurgated History

Megabyte had traced the Byte family tree ancestry back to the late dark ages knight Sir Squeaks-a-Bit. An ancient scroll found in the cellars of the old book shop in Petersfield relates the story of how King Arthur won his first great battle against the Vikings.

In most of the early skirmishes, when it started to rain, the English scouts used to go back into their tents and brew up a cup of tea. By the time the rain had stopped, the Vikings, who had come in their longboats and were used to being wet, had usually surrounded the tents, cut the cords and captured everyone.

On one occasion, Squeaks-a-Bit, who didn't like tea, stayed outside Arthur's tent and fought off a dreadful force of kidnappers single handed until the weather cleared up, and the knights of the round table came out to see what all the fuss was about. For saving the king, he was dubbed a knight, but despite all his best efforts, the rain had got into his armor which squeaked a bit ever after. That was in the days before WD40.

Sometime during the reign of king Henry the 8th, the family name changed from "Bit" to "Byte" as a result of a typo on a birth certificate, and in the 18th century, the wizard Spellabyte, started his public school in Portsmouth to educate the second sons of goblins and pirates. But that's another story...

The Perils of Working with Early Hard Drives

Editor:- December 18, 2006 - there have been many stories published this year related to the 50th anniversary of the hard disk drive.

But yesterday I heard a story with a different spin - about the dangers posed by early mass storage devices. It came from my brother in law Peter Downes.

"In 1964 I was a programmer / operator at Pilkington Glass in St Helens. At that time Pilkington had one of the largest commercial computer installations in the UK. It included ICT computers, countless card punches and readers, Ampex tape drives, and, I think, CDC disk drives.

"One night in the main computer room I witnessed the internal cylinder of a hard drive break out of its cabinet. It was several feet in diameter and spinning at high speed. It bounced when it hit the floor, then as if deciding which way to go, it hovered and raced through the glass partition, and sped along until it hit the solid wall of the building at which point it exploded. The computer room was sprayed with glass, but luckily it was safety glass and I wasn't hurt. I couldn't help thinking that if it had come for me it would have killed me. One thing I'm not sure about is why it bounced when it first hit the floor and only exploded when it hit the concrete wall. There was a lot of energy in the cylinder - and it had a horizontal spindle."

Editor's Note to Storage Historians

ACSL, publisher of StorageSearch.com, has been a primary source of market data since 1992. All the contents are subject to our copyright. Please cite our publication if you extract small segments of text or use this site in your research.

Finding stuff:- Google's site search is a useful tool for datamining these archives.

Linked urls:- Vendors often restructure their web sites which means that external links which were correct at the original time of publication - may not be visible now. A useful tool for examining the full text of linked stories, articles and web sites is The Internet Archive beacuse we have allowed their crawler to record the links on our site since it was created.

My own email inbox contains copies of press releases, articles and reader / contributor dialogs related to much more content than ever got published here. I sometimes find it useful for resolving obscure relationships in emerging stories.

Storage History

This historical archive of the storage market is the gateway to all the daily storage news published on StorageSearch.com from January 2000 to the present day (thousands of stories). It also includes a market timeline from 1949 to 1999.

Each link below takes you to a full week of archived news stories.

2009

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

2003

2002

2001

2000

Storage news - 2000, December - week 1,
Storage news - 2000, December - week 2 - Imperial's SSDs are eBay's Holiday Helpers,
3 - 4,

Storage news - 2000, November - week 1, 2, 3, 4,

Storage news - 2000, October - week 1, 2, 3,

Storage news - 2000, October - week 4 - EMC Study Finds Explosive Data Growth,

Storage news - 2000, September - week 1, 2, 3, 4,

Storage news - 2000, August - weeks 1-2, 3, 4,

Storage news - January, February, March, April, May ,
Storage news - 2000, June - HP partners with EMusic.com
July - weeks 1-2 , 3 - 4

click here for today's storage news

Here are some other dates from storage history...

1999 - a terabyte of RAID storage cost $79,000. Scroll to the foot of this page to see the contemporary banner ad we ran with that price point from Dynamic Network Factory.

Artecon merged with Box Hill Systems to become Dot Hill

1998 - STORAGEsearch.com is launched in September 1998.

Also, in the same month, Google Inc. is incorporated as a company.

1997 - Imation launches the SuperDisk - which was a very high capacity (at the time) floppy disk drive - offering nearly 100x the capacity of an industry standard floppy disk. DEC ran an ad for its StorageWorks in our SPARC Directory to target Sun users - who spents billions of dollars on 3rd party storage from DEC and EMC in the following years because they were much better than Sun's own storage arrays.

1995 - Xiotech founded.

How big were disk drives and memory in 1995? - Sun Microsystems launched its first 64 bit SPARC workstations, the Ultra-1 and 2. RAM was upto 512MB. The internal 3.5" hard disk provided upto 4.2GB capacity.

1994 - first directory of Fibre-channel adapters published in ACSL's SPARC Product Directory

Ancot ships first Fibre Channel analyzer.

1991 - ACSL, publisher of STORAGEsearch.com founded. Our first product (1992) was a printed directory of Sun SBus compatible host bus adapters, and SPARC workstations and servers.

1988 - CMS Peripherals founded.

1987 - RAID concept created by the University of California at Berkeley

Plasmon founded.

Bus-Tech founded.

1986 - the editor, then working as hardware manager at a UK company called Databasix, was tasked with designing a disk array controller to parallelize the data transfer from multiple low cost 5.25" hard disks. We didn't call them RAIDs in those days - because the term hadn't been invented yet - but the concept was not new. The prototype proved the concept - but we didn't productise it.

1985 - PNY Technologies founded

1984 - Qualstar founded.

1981 - SCSI interface launched as a virtual intelligent disk drive connection.

LSI Logic founded by by Wilf Corrigan.

1980 - BMC Software founded.

Overland Storage founded.

1979 - Egan and Roger Marino start EMC.

Spectra Logic founded.

Seagate Technology founded. Its first product, the ST506 hard drive, had a capacity of 5 megabytes.

SASI interface created by Shugart Associates. This was the precursor to SCSI (parallel SCSI) - article:- SCSI History - PCGuide.com

1978 - Texas Memory Systems founded.

Memories of 1978

Editor:- as an "experienced" (1 year out of college) electronics engineer in 1978 - I started designing and managing my own first complete product (an automated fuel flow consumption meter and data logger for engine test beds) using Intel's 8748 microprocessor. That was a single chip micro with I/O, timers, program and user memory all on the same chip. The memory capacity was 1k bytes (1, 024 bytes) and the RAM was 64 bytes!

I managed to squeeze everything, including the operating system, into the 1k with about 5 bytes to spare - because the assembly language instructions were very efficient and occupied just 1 or 2 bytes, and I used a lot of subroutines.

Needing quite sophisticated maths and not having the time nor inclination nor memory to do this - I cheated by adding in a calculator chip as a co-processor. In future designs, as I got more experienced, and the development tools got better I did more in software and less in hardware, and made sure there were sockets for expansion memory!

In my next project - moving on from manually looking up assembly language hex codes printed on a card edited on RAM and archived on EPROM (Prompt-48 development system) - to a development system which was more like a modern computer was a great productivity aid

Intel's (blue box) development system at that time cost more than my house - which is why we only bought one after we had proved this was going to be a viable business. It included a text editor (called Edit), an assembly language linker and loader, an in-circuit emulation system, 8 bit 8080 processor with 32K RAM and a VDU and floppy disk drive. It ran an operating system called Isis - which was the model for CP/M, and later, DOS.

BTW - I didn't complain too much about the Prompt-48 - which was my idea to save cost compared to using external consultants. In fact we rented it. It was a step up from what was used in an earlier microprocessor project - which I managed - having just come out of college but having read some micro manuals - which was as much experience as anyone else had in those days.

In that earlier, 1977 system, (a ship's diesel engine training simulator with over 400 digital, and 50 analog I/O in a 15 foot long, 6 foot high metal control panel covered in switches, lamps and meters) the development tools consisted of a teletype which punched hex codes onto paper tape. We used to spool hundreds of feet of paper tape all over the floor. That's what suggested the icon we now use on STORAGEsearch.com for storage software. Click on the image (right) to see a bigger picture of the tape and hedgehogs.

1976 - the world's #1 personal computer - the APPLE-II - is launched with 48k bytes on-board RAM - from Apple II History. How much memory is that? Well a kilobyte is about a thousand times smaller than a megabyte, which in turn is a thousand times smaller than a gigabyte. The whole PC had a memory about 1, 000 times smaller than the smallest flash memory sticks available circa 2003.

1972 - IBM's 8 inch floppy drive the IBM 3740 hits the market. Capacity is 250K bytes.

1970 - Intel launches the first commercially successful dynamic RAM

1979 - Western Digital founded.

1969 - StorageTek founded.

1967 - Dataram founded.

1956 - IBM invented the hard drive in San Jose, California and delivered it on September 13, 1956 as the RAMAC (Random Access Method of Accounting and Control.) ... from a Hitachi news story.

1953 - IBM 650 Magnetic Drum Data Processing System Machine is announced.

1949 - An Wang invents magnetic core store.

article:- 5 Decades of Magnetic Data Storage (1940's to 1990's) - by A. S. Hoagland, formerly with IBM, (pdf)

It's many years since you've seen a storage ad with this kind of pricing. We ran this ad on the left from Dynamic Network Factory in 1999. You can see more old storage ads in our banner ad archive

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