Month: November 2012

Enterprise SSDs to Grow Over 10x by 2016

Objective Analysis 2012 Enterprise SSD ReportObjective Analysis is pleased to announce availability of a new report: Enterprise SSDs: Technologies & Markets.

The report’s key finding: The stunning growth of SSDs in enterprise servers and storage systems is only going to get stronger.  Objective Analysis finds that the enterprise SSD market is likely to approach $4 billion in revenues by 2016, nearly six times that of 2011, while unit shipments will increase by ten times during that period to almost 4 million units.

This 104-page report is the third update of Objective Analysis’ cornerstone enterprise SSD report.  The new report reviews Continue reading “Enterprise SSDs to Grow Over 10x by 2016”

Why Don’t HDDs Spin Faster than 15K RPM?

Some claim this to be a pohoto of a jet breaking the sound barrierSome folks who look at the speed difference between HDDs and SSDs ask themselves why HDD makers don’t defend their market against the SSD menace by cranking the speed beyond 15,000 RPM.  An unfortunately popular answer is that the edge of the HDD would have to break the sound barrier and the HDD would shatter.  Is this true?

With a little back-of-the-envelope calculation The SSD Guy can rapidly disprove this. (Forgive me, but I am going to mix metric and English measure here.)

The speed of sound is Continue reading “Why Don’t HDDs Spin Faster than 15K RPM?”

How Controllers Maximize SSD Life – Internal NAND Management

Tempus FugitGiven that you have used all those other forms of improving SSD wear that we have discussed so far, but you still don’t find that this is enough, what do you do next?  Well a few SSD controllers go one step further and manage some of the inner workings of the NAND flash chip itself.

If that sounds like a significant undertaking to you, then you clearly understand why so very few controllers take this approach.  The information used to perform this function is not generally available – it takes a special relationship with the NAND flash supplier – and you can’t develop this relationship unless the NAND supplier Continue reading “How Controllers Maximize SSD Life – Internal NAND Management”

Intel Intros Fast Datacenter SATA SSD

IOPS Over Time - Competing SSD vs. Intel DC S3700Today Intel announced a new SATA III SSD, the DC S3700 Series.  The new product is fast, supporting 75,000 random 4K read IOPS and 36,000 random 4K write IOPS.  Average read latency is 45microseconds (µs) with writes averaging 65µs.  Sustained sequential reads are 500 megabytes/sec with sustained sequential writes at 460.  The read performance of this SSD, although a SATA device, is twice that of Intel’s 710 PCIe SSD announced in April, and writes are a full 15 times faster.  Intel calls this performance: “Scary fast!”

Intel says this device is its best Continue reading “Intel Intros Fast Datacenter SATA SSD”

How Controllers Maximize SSD Life – Feedback on Block Wear

Tempus FugitOne way that SSD controllers maximize the life of an SSD is to use feedback on the life of flash blocks to determine how wear has impacted them.  Although this used to be very uncommon, it is now being incorporated into a number of controllers.

Here’s what this is all about: Everybody knows that endurance specifications tell how much life there is in a block, right?  For SLC it is typically 100,000 erase/write cycles, and for MLC it can be as high as 10,000 cycles (for older processes) but goes down to 5,000 or even 3,000 for newer processes.  TLC endurance can be in the hundreds of cycles.  Now the question is: “What happens after that?”

In most cases individual bits start to Continue reading “How Controllers Maximize SSD Life – Feedback on Block Wear”