May 2012 – The SSD Guy Blog

The “Real” SSD Guy

Not long after I started writing this blog I heard from Les Tokar, who runs The SSD Review. It seems that Les had been calling himslef “The SSD Guy” for quite a while before I started to use that name for myself.

Les was more than kind about my using the name as well, all he asked was for me to clarify that this blog and his are unrelated, which is spelled out with the disclaimer to the right of this post.

I later met Tokar himself as we both attended Tom Coughlin’s Storage Visions conference last January. That’s where his lovely wife Karen snapped the photo of the two of us on this blog post.

I find The SSD Review to be a font of useful information. If you haven’t read it, please give it a look.

As for Les Tokar, I offer a tip of the hat to a real gentleman and fellow blogger.

Toshiba Reveals Hybrid HDD Research

Nikkei Electronics published an article on May 22 detailing a May 17 briefing by Toshiba president Norio Sasaki. Mr. Sasaki told of the company’s plans to introduce a hybrid HDD (HHDD) in September of this year that is aimed at the Ultrabook market. The article notes that Toshiba is the only company that produces both NAND flash and HDDs, now that Samsung sold its HDD business to Seagate.

The article also says that Toshiba: “aims to become one of the top three companies in the HDD market in terms of market share.” The SSD Guy is forced to wonder at this comment, since there are only three HDD manufacturers in existence today: Toshiba, Western Digital, and Seagate.

The Seagate Momentus XT, the only Continue reading “Toshiba Reveals Hybrid HDD Research”

Big Data? Move the App to the Data

In Big Data circles there is a saying that it might be easier to move the application program to the data, rather than to move the data to the server where the application is working. There’s a lot of wisdom in that. The application is small and can move rapidly. Big data takes time to move.

In that spirit at least one Violin Memory customer has decided to move their applications into the servers that reside within one of Violin’s 6000 Series flash Memory Arrays. These are the two green boards running Continue reading “Big Data? Move the App to the Data”

SSDs and Fast Erase

The SSD Guy has run across some confusion lately about fast erase on SSDs. It’s time to clear this up.

SSDs can undergo a very fast erase, and have had that capability for a number of years. After ruggedness this is probably the key reason the military is so enamored with SSDs.

Let’s say that you were out to capture a major terrorism kingpin and your helicopter crashed. How would you assure that the Continue reading “SSDs and Fast Erase”