NAND in the PC – The SSD Guy Blog

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”

Flash vs. DRAM in PCs – Flash Wins

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”

Toshiba Announces its Hybrid Drive

Now that we have seen announcements of hybrid drives from Western Digital and Seagate, Toshiba arrives with a formal announcement of the product that was on display at last month’s Flash Memory Summit. Two 2.5″ Toshiba hybrid drives are starting to sample at 750GB and 1TB capacities. Both have 8GB NAND caches, 6Gb/s SATA 3 interfaces, and 5,400RPM spindle speeds. They are both built using 32nm SLC NAND, Toshiba’s “generation before last” technology, preceding the 24nm and 19nm nodes shipping in high volume today.

More importantly, both are 9.5mm in height, a thickness that renders them difficult to incorporate into the 18mm maximum thickness of the smaller Ultrabooks – a notebook form factor that Intel is heavily promoting.

How is this whole market Continue reading “Toshiba Announces its Hybrid Drive”