The folks at the PCI-SIG technical work groups are working hard to agree upon a specification for PCIe Gen. 8 by 2028. In a recent announcement the group said that the specification’s draft 0.5 has been released for member review ahead of schedule, and that the released specification remains on track for full release by 2028.
As with earlier PCIe generations, the goals Continue reading “PCIe Gen. 8 Spec. Racing Forward”
It’s earnings season, and nearly all of the major NAND flash makers, all of whom are leading SSD makers as well, have reported astronomical revenues for the first calendar quarter of 2026. (The only straggler is Kioxia, who won’t be reporting until the middle of May.) The SSD Guy dug into these companies’ earnings announcements, and their numbers show that AI’s phenomenal capital spending is driving NAND and SSD revenues unlike any previously seen.
Take Sandisk for example, who Continue reading “SSD Shortage Drives Stratospheric Revenues”
Those super high-capacity SSDs that have become so very popular in hyperscale datacenters are about to lose out to a new HDD technology that promises storage at extraordinary rack densities and colossal streaming bandwidth while taking advantage of today’s trend towards liquid-cooled datacenters. The SSD Guy is told that this as a technology that promises to knock SSDs out of one of their Continue reading “New HDD Threatens Enterprise SSD Market”
Today’s HDD shortage, driven by the current AI spending surge, has created a new opportunity for SSDs. Suddenly, QLC SSDs, which had previously been used almost exclusively in consumer PCs, are now being purchased in high volume by hyperscale datacenters for two reasons: To add a new layer to the Memory/Storage Hierarchy, and to make up for HDDs that have recently Continue reading “Why Are We Having an SSD Shortage?”
Back in August, at the FMS show, keynoters surprised their audiences with promises of upcoming 100 million IOPS SSDs. Given that today’s highest-performing SSDs provide well under ten million IOPS, how will SSD makers reach this very challenging goal?
We can gain some insight into this from a little information in a Continue reading “100 Million IOPS SSDs? You Must be Kidding!”
Meta recently published a blog post that proposes adding a QLC SSD layer between HDD and TLC SSDs. The post, titled “A Case for QLC SSDs in the Data Center,” argues that a QLC SSD layer between a system’s TLC SSDs and its HDDs can help improve Meta’s overall system cost/performance ratio.
The SSD Guy finds that this Continue reading “Meta: Adding a QLC Layer for Better Cost/Performance”
SSDs are often used to either minimize a server’s DRAM requirements or to reduce the number of servers required in a data center, a fact that The SSD Guy likes to bring up whenever he can. These attributes were the main reason that SSDs gained such rapid acceptance in hyperscale datacenters about 20 years ago, when the world’s largest datacenters began to radically change the structure of their systems and embrace the widespread use of SSDs.
With this in mind, it’s unsurprising that Continue reading “Using SSDs to Reduce AI Training Costs”
When the switch is made from HDDs to SSDs in most applications there are usually very strong benefits, but in the case of spacecraft, SSDs are causing no end of trouble.
Sure, SSDs provide certain extraordinary performance and other technical benefits. Of particular importance in space applications are the facts that they consume less power, they are more resilient to the high g-forces endured during launch, and, most importantly, they weigh less than HDDs, which is extraordinarily valuable when it costs tens of dollars per gram to put satellites into orbit. The big drawback is that Continue reading “Why SSDs are Problematic in Space”
Solidigm has unveiled a hot-swappable liquid-cooled enterprise SSD. The company expects for this to help remove any need for cooling fans and allow designers to create fully liquid-cooled AI servers and storage systems. They took some time to brief The SSD Guy about their new approach to heat removal.
Here’s what they were looking to accomplish: Hyperscalers and other large computing installations would like Continue reading “A Liquid Cooled SSD, AND It’s Hot Swappable!”
AI is on everyone’s minds these days, and SSD makers have lately been touting certain models, explaining that they have been designed for AI applications. Why would that be? Is there a difference between AI SSDs and those used for conventional applications?
The answers to both questions would be “Yes,” and in this post The SSD Guy will attempt to explain why in a Continue reading “Why Does AI Need Different SSDs?”
