Client SSDs – Page 3 – The SSD Guy Blog

Are SSDs Approaching Price Parity with HDDs?

A recent Storage Newsletter article argues that SSD prices are approaching HDD prices, and that the gap has narrowed to only a 2.7 times difference.

Upon closer inspection, though, the reader will note that this is only true at lower capacities. The narrowing price gap at lower capacities has always existed in this market. The SSD Guy was making that argument back in 2007!

This post’s graphic shows a chart from the first report ever published by Objective Analysis over a decade ago: The Solid State Disk Market – A Rigorous Look.

The point of this chart was to illustrate that, at low capacities, SSDs are cheaper, while at higher capacities HDDs provide lower-priced storage.

The concept is simple: It’s uneconomical for an Continue reading “Are SSDs Approaching Price Parity with HDDs?”

Storage Visions Conference Coming Oct 22

Once again The SSD Guy will be playing a part in the annual Storage Visions conference which has been moved this year to the Santa Clara Hyatt Hotel adjacent to the Santa Clara Convention Center. It’s now a 2-day conference (October 22-23) and has an agenda packed with interesting subjects, speakers, and panelists.

Storage Visions’ mission is to bring together the vendors, end users, researchers and visionaries that will meet growing demand for digital storage for the “coming data tsunami.”

I will moderate a panel on an exciting new technology that is currently known by a few different names, including “In-Situ Processing,” “Computational Storage,” and “Intelligent SSDs” (iSSD). It’s a kind of SSD that uses internal processing to reduce the amount of data traffic between the server and storage. This helps get past an issue that plagues many applications which spend more time and energy moving data back and forth than they do actually processing that data.

The panel, at 8:15 Monday morning, October 22, is Continue reading “Storage Visions Conference Coming Oct 22”

Podcast: Flash Memory Summit

Those of you who enjoy listening to podcasts may want to hear Ray Lucchesi (Silverton Consulting) and Howard Marks (Deep Storage) interview The SSD Guy for their series “Greybeards on Storage.”

This interview is their 70th episode covering the world of storage. These guys do a fantastic job of probing this industry with great enthusiasm and insight.

This episode is a 42-minute compendium of the sights and goings-on at last August’s Flash Memory Summit along with a number of side trips into the world of SSDs and memory chips. It’s not strictly structured, and not strictly serious, but just three industry insiders having a lot of fun sharing their observations.

Some of the broad range of subjects that we Continue reading “Podcast: Flash Memory Summit”

The Micron QLC SSD – No Surprises Here

Last Monday, May 21, Micron introduced the industry’s first QLC SSD for enterprise applications. Micron’s press release is HERE.

Although this is a laudatory feat, the industry has been headed in this direction for a number of years. In fact, this was the subject of a presentation that I made to the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) during its Winter Symposium in January 2014.

The slide in which I discussed this appears as this post’s graphic. (Click on it to see a larger rendition.) This table attempted to illustrate that all SSDs were headed towards TLC (and implicitly QLC) over the long term despite the fact that naysayers persistently argued that this could never happen. It looks at attitudes over history and considers the fact that things that the industry said could “Never” happen ended up eventually becoming the mainstream technology.

Since I live, eat, and breathe Continue reading “The Micron QLC SSD – No Surprises Here”

NVDIMM Report Now Available

I am proud to share the release of a new Objective Analysis report detailing the nonvolatile dual inline memory module (NVDIMM) market. Titled: “Profiting from the NVDIMM Market,” this report explains the What, How, Why, & When of NVDIMMs, and forecasts the market through 2021.

Readers are aware that I have been watching this market for some time, and never really know whether I should post about NVDIMMs in The SSD Guy or in The Memory Guy, since the boundary between memory and storage is bridged by these products. My solution: publish posts about this report in both blogs!

According to the Objective Analysis NVDIMM market model the NVDIMM market can be expected to reach nearly 12 million units by 2021, representing a 105% average annual growth rate. The forecast methodology used for this model has provided some of the semiconductor business’ most consistently-accurate forecasts. The report, which includes this forecast, was the result of thorough research into the technology and the circumstances that led to the introduction of NVDIMMs, NVDIMM vendor and user interviews, and briefings from those standards bodies that are diligently working to provide timely support for this new technology.

This in-depth 80-page analysis explores the Continue reading “NVDIMM Report Now Available”

Comparing SSDs to Tomatoes

A few years ago The SSD Guy posted an analogy that Intel’s Jim Pappas uses to illustrate the latency differences between DRAM, an SSD, and an HDD. If we look at DRAM latency to be a single heartbeat, then what happens when we scale that timing up to represent SSDs and HDDs? How many heartbeats would it take to access either one, and what could you do in that time?

I still think it’s a pretty interesting way to make all these latency differences easier to understand.

Just recently I learned of a Rich Report video of a 2015 presentation in which Micron’s Ryan Baxter uses a different and equally interesting analogy based on tomatoes.

Tomatoes aren’t the first thing that comes to my mind when I think about SSDs, but this video may change my way of thinking!

The tomato slide, 9:30 into the presentation, is Continue reading “Comparing SSDs to Tomatoes”

Comparing Wear Figures on SSDs

I have been receiving questions lately from people who are puzzled when companies use different parameters than their competitors use to specify the endurance of their SSDs. How do you compare one against the other? Some companies even switch from one parameter to another to define the endurance of different SSDs within their product line.

I have found that Intel uses three different endurance measures for its products: DWPD (drive writes per day), TBW (terabytes written), and GB/day.

There’s not any real difference between any of these measures – each one is one way of stating how many times each of the SSD’s locations can be overwritten before the drive has gone past its warrantied life.

The relationships between these three measures are illustrated in this post’s graphic. You can click on it to see an expanded version. It’s all pretty simple. We’ll spell out the relationships in detail below, but in brief, if you want to compare Continue reading “Comparing Wear Figures on SSDs”

Intel Pits Optane SSDs Against NAND SSDs

Only a week after announcing its Optane Enterprise SSDs Intel has launched m.2-format Optane SSDs for end users. It appears that we are at the onset of an Optane surge.

These SSDs communicate over the PCIe bus bringing more of the 3D XPoint’s performance to the user than would a SATA interface.

Pricing is $44 for a 16GB module and $77 for 32GB. That’s $2.75 and $2.40 (respectively) per gigabyte, or about half the price of DRAM. Intel says that these products will ship on April 24.

What’s most interesting about Intel’s Optane pitch is that the company appears to be telling the world that SSDs are no longer important with its use of the slogan: “Get the speed, keep the capacity.” This message is designed to directly address the quandary that faces PC buyers when considering an SSD: Do they want an SSD’s speed so much that they are willing to accept either Continue reading “Intel Pits Optane SSDs Against NAND SSDs”

Managing SSDs Using Machine Learning

SSDs use a huge number of internal parameters to achieve a tricky balance between performance, wear, and cost. The SSD Guy likes to compare this to a recording studio console like the one in this post’s graphic to emphasize just how tricky it is for SSD designers to find the right balance. Imagine trying to manage all of those knobs! (The picture is JacoTen’s Wikipedia photo of a Focusrite console.)

Vendors who produce differentiated SSDs pride themselves in their ability to fine-tune these parameters to achieve better performance or endurance than competing products.

About a year ago I suggested to the folks at NVMdurance that they might consider applying their machine learning algorithm to this problem. (The original NVMdurance product line was described in a Memory Guy post a while ago.) After all, the company makes a machine learning engine that tunes the numerous internal parameters of a NAND flash chip to extend the chip’s life while maintaining the specified performance. SSD management would be a natural use of machine learning since both SSDs and NAND flash chips currently use difficult and time-consuming manual processes to find the best mix of parameters to drive the design.

Little did I know that NVMdurance’s researchers Continue reading “Managing SSDs Using Machine Learning”

Why 3D XPoint SSDs Will Be Slow

Something that has been confusing a number of people is the performance of Intel’s 3D XPoint-based SSDs. Why are they so slow?

Let me back up a little – they’re not really slow. When Intel compared its standard NAND flash based PCIe SSD to a similar SSD based on 3D XPoint memory, the XPoint model ran 7-8 times faster, which is very impressive. Intel demonstrated that at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) last August and several times since then.

But Intel and Micron have been boasting since its introduction that 3D XPoint Memory is 1,000 times as fast as NAND flash. How do you get from a 1,000 times speed advantage down to a speed improvement of only 7-8 times?

That’s what the graphic in this post will explain. The small rendition above is just Continue reading “Why 3D XPoint SSDs Will Be Slow”