Month: March 2016

Why SSD and HDD Prices Move in Parallel

ASTC 2016 HDD RoadmapWhy are HDD prices tracking SSD prices?  Why don’t they cross over?  These are questions that The SSD Guy is often asked, especially by people who anticipate a crossover in the near future.

In essence it’s because both the HDD industry and the semiconductor industry have set goals for themselves to achieve 30% average annual price reductions.  If they are both on the same trajectory, and if there’s an order of magnitude difference between HDD and SSD prices today, then there will be an order of magnitude difference in the future as well.

The 30% average annual decline in SSD prices has a convenient name: Moore’s Law.  Although there’s no physical, economic, or other restriction behind Moore’s Law (so it’s not really a law at all) it serves as a guide for the industry.  Chip makers set their sights at doubling the number of transistors on a chip every couple of years, and this equates to average annual price decreases of 30%.

The HDD business also Continue reading “Why SSD and HDD Prices Move in Parallel”

Toshiba Reveals Restructuring Plans

Toshiba's Yokkaichi Manufacturing ComplexOn Friday Toshiba revealed its restructuring plans aimed at returning the company to profitability and growth through management accountability.

Of special interest to The SSD Guy was the fact that the company will refocus its semiconductor and HDD businesses, currently called the “Semiconductor & Storage Products Company” partly by giving it a new name: “Storage & Electron Devices Company”.  This division will focus on the semiconductor group’s good prospects and profitability while maintaining a focus on the fact that SSDs and HDDs share a business.  In the not-too-distant past Toshiba has run these two businesses separately.

The group plans to be “A pillar of income with Memories as a core business”.  To achieve this, Toshiba has stated that it will enhance its NAND cost competitiveness by accelerating development of BiCS (Toshiba’s 3D NAND technology) and by expanding the SSD business.   There are three parts to this Continue reading “Toshiba Reveals Restructuring Plans”

IBM Software + SanDisk Hardware

One of SanDisk's InfiniFlash BoardsIn a joint press release, SanDisk and IBM announced support for each other’s products.  The IBM Spectrum Scale filesystem will support SanDisk’s InfiniFlash all-flash array to provide a high-capacity high-speed software-defined storage system.

At first glance this may seem a little odd, since IBM sells its own all-flash array, the FlashSystem, which became an IBM product line when the company acquired Texas Memory Systems (TMS) back in 2012.  That is not the case, though.  IBM has been validating that its Spectrum Storage products will work with just about any storage type that its customers may want to use.  Rather than narrowing this software’s support to only IBM storage systems, IBM is showing that Spectrum Scale is flexible enough to work with a multitude of solutions, supporting InfiniFlash the same as it does other internal server capacity and other external storage in the form of JBODs (“Just a Bunch of Disks”) or JBOFs (“Just a Bunch of Flash”).

In this case IBM has worked with SanDisk to validate that its Spectrum Scale storage management software works with InfiniFlash, just as it does with those many other storage solutions.

In the announcement IBM explains that Continue reading “IBM Software + SanDisk Hardware”