Western Digital today announced a change to the architecture of HDDs that the company showed can increase an HDD’s capacity and performance without changes to the heads, media, or mechanics. Since the design, called OptiNAND, involves a good bit of NAND flash, The SSD Guy decided that it warranted discussion here.
That, and the fact that the company said Continue reading “WDC Rearchitects the HDD”
There have been numerous changes to SSDs since they moved into the mainstream 15 years ago, with controllers providing increasing, then decreasing endurance levels, and offering greater, then lesser levels of autonomy. What has been missing is any ability for the system to determine the level of performance that the SSD provides.
Recently Kioxia, the company formerly known as Toshiba Memory, announced Continue reading “What’s Software-Enabled Flash?”
This post completes The SSD Guy’s four-part series to help explain Intel’s two recently-announced modes of accessing its Optane DIMM, formally known as the “Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory.”
In the second and third parts of this series we discussed Intel’s Memory Mode and the company’s App Direct Mode. This final part aims to compare the two: When would you use one and when the other?
There’s really no simple answer. As with all benchmarks, certain applications will perform better with one mode than with another, while other applications will behave the opposite way. Adding to the problem is the fact that App Direct Mode actually supports not one but four different access methods, which will be further explained below. As a rule of thumb performance for large serial accesses might be Continue reading “Intel’s Optane: Two Confusing Modes. Part 4) Comparing the Modes”
This post is a continuation of a four part series in The SSD Guy blog to help explain Intel’s two recently-announced modes of accessing its Optane DIMM, formally known as the “Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory.”
Intel’s App Direct Mode is the more interesting of the two Optane operating modes since it supports in-memory persistence, which opens up a new and different approach to improve the performance of tomorrow’s standard software. While today’s software operates under the assumption that data can only be persistent if it is written to slow storage (SSDs, HDDs, the cloud, etc.) Optane under App Direct Mode allows data to persist at memory speeds, as also do other nonvolatile memories like NVDIMMs under the SNIA NVM Programming Model.
App Direct Mode implements the full SNIA NVM Programming Model described in an earlier SSD Guy post and allows software to Continue reading “Intel’s Optane: Two Confusing Modes. Part 3) App Direct Mode”
The SSD Guy has often explained to readers that the storage industry is caught between two alternatives: fast and costly, or cheap and slow. This is the key difference between SSDs and HDDs. I have recently learned of a new secret government research effort, code named “SiliDisk,” that will provide the best of both worlds by marrying flash memory with the mechanics of an HDD.
The approach is incredibly ingenious, while remaining deceptively simple: All that is required is to replace the disks in an HDD with the wafers used to manufacture NAND flash. Both are round, so there’s little engineering effort to switch from a magnetic disk to a flash wafer.
The NAND flash on the wafer is almost completely standard. The only two changes are that the chips aren’t scribed or sawn apart, saving a small sum, but a hole must be etched through the center (which can be seen in the photo below) offsetting this savings. The HDD mechanisms are unchanged with one exception: While today’s HDDs are largely manufactured using 2.5″ and 3.5″ platters (65mm & 90mm), NAND flash is exclusively produced on 300mm wafers. This means that Continue reading “HDD & SSD Combined Into One”
This post is the second part of a four part series in The SSD Guy blog to help explain Intel’s two recently-announced modes of accessing its Optane DIMM, formally known as the “Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory.”
The most difficult thing to understand about the Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory when used in Memory Mode is that it is not persistent. Go back and read that again, because it didn’t make any sense the first time you read it. It didn’t make any sense the second time either, did it?
Don’t worry. This is not really important. The difficulty stems from Intel’s marketing decision to call Optane DIMMs by the name “Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory.” Had they simply called them “Optane DIMMs” like everyone expected them to then there would have been Continue reading “Intel’s Optane: Two Confusing Modes. Part 2) Memory Mode”
Intel recently announced two operating modes for the company’s new Optane DIMMs, formally known as “Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory.” The company has been trying to help the world to understand these two new operating modes but they are still pretty baffling to most of the people The SSD Guy speaks to. Some say that the concepts make their heads want to explode!
How does Optane’s “Memory Mode” work? How does “App Direct” Mode work? In this four-part series will try to provide some answers.
Like all of my NVDIMM-related posts, this series challenges me with the question: “Should it be published in The SSD Guy, or in The Memory Guy?” This is a point of endless confusion for me, since NVDIMM and Intel’s Optane blur the lines between Memory and Storage. I have elected to post this in The SSD Guy with the hope that it will be found by readers who want to understand Optane for its storage capabilities.
Memory Mode is the easy sell for the short term. It works with all current application software without modification. It just makes it look like you have a TON of DRAM.
App Direct Mode is really cool if Continue reading “Intel’s Optane: Two Confusing Modes. Part 1) Overview”
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”
This week Intel announced the Optane SSD DC P4800X Series, new enterprise SSDs based on the company’s 3D XPoint memory technology which Intel says is the first new memory technology to be introduced since 1989. The technology was introduced to fill a price/performance gap that might impede Intel’s sales of high-performance CPUs.
Intel was all aglow with the promise of performance, claiming that the newly-released SSDs offer: “Consistently amazing response time under load.”
Since the early 1990s Intel has realized that it needs for the platform’s performance to keep pace with the ongoing performance increases of its new processors. A slow platform will limit the performance of any processor, and if customers don’t see any benefit from purchasing a more expensive processor, then Intel will be unable to keep its processor prices high.
Recently NAND flash SSDs have helped Intel to improve the platform’s speed, as did the earlier migration of Continue reading “Intel Announces Optane SSDs for the Enterprise”
Some time ago Objective Analysis ran nearly 300 standard benchmarks on a PC with varying amounts of flash and DRAM and found that a dollar’s worth of flash provided a greater performance boost than a dollar’s worth of DRAM once the DRAM size grew above a certain minimum (1-2GB) depending on the benchmark.
You might wonder how this could possibly be true. Everyone knows that best way to improve any computing system’s performance is to add DRAM main memory. How could flash, which is orders of magnitude slower than DRAM, provide a bigger performance boost than DRAM?
It all makes sense if you think of the DRAM of something that is there only to make the HDD look faster. More is better, but if you can use a little less DRAM and add a large flash memory layer then disk accesses appear to speed up even more.
The benchmark data and the price/performance findings that are Continue reading “Flash vs. DRAM in PCs – Flash Wins”
