Over the past couple of months rumors asserted that Western Digital (WDC) was in talks to acquire joint venture partner Kioxia. This is not the first time such rumors have emerged. In November of 2020, when Kioxia was expected to make its initial public offering, WDC was rumored to be in such talks, and before that, in early 2017, when Toshiba first started to plan to spin off its NAND flash and SSD business, WDC was rumored to Continue reading “Should WDC Acquire Kioxia?”
Category: SSD Manufacturers
Micron’s Tiny Little 2TB SSD
Micron has been moving very quickly for the past couple of years, and that has led to the company’s undisputed leadership in NAND flash layers and DRAM process nodes. The first to ship 176-layer NAND flash chips a year ago, and now 176-layer QLC NAND, Micron packs a huge amount of storage into a single chip. Since it uses a CUA (CMOS Under Array) architecture, the die size is perhaps Continue reading “Micron’s Tiny Little 2TB SSD”
Solidigm, SK hynix’ New SSD/Flash Subsidiary
While many of us, The SSD Guy included, were preparing for our New Year’s celebration, SK hynix, on December 30, closed the first phase of the company’s takeover of Intel’s NAND flash and SSD business, and created a new subsidiary that has been named Solidigm.
This is the first of two phases of the acquisition, which the companies agreed to in October 2020. With this move, SK hynix has Continue reading “Solidigm, SK hynix’ New SSD/Flash Subsidiary”
Intel Discontinues Optane Consumer SSDs. Is This Important?
On Friday, January 15, Intel announced the discontinuation of certain of the company’s Optane SSDs for consumers PCs. Naturally this is making Optane users curious about the future of the entire product line. Is this a big move?
In a word: “No.” It’s a relatively small part of overall Optane shipments, and it is probably Continue reading “Intel Discontinues Optane Consumer SSDs. Is This Important?”
Why Did Intel Sell its SSD Business?
Intel recently sold its NAND flash business, which was mainly producing SSDs, to SK hynix, a Korean competitor. Some people have asked the SSD Guy why did Intel do this? The company had highly-regarded products that could command top prices. Since Intel’s NAND flash fab is in Dalian, China, one person even asked if the divestiture could have been in response to the US-China trade war.
A better question is: “Why did Intel Continue reading “Why Did Intel Sell its SSD Business?”
How Many Optane SSDs has Intel Sold?
If you’re an industry analyst like The SSD Guy you find that useful data can come from unexpected places. When Intel announced the sale of its NAND flash business to SK hynix this month the company also provided useful information about Optane SSD sales. You have to know a little bit about Intel’s organizational structure to understand. Let me explain.
The SSD part of Intel’s Optane business has been Continue reading “How Many Optane SSDs has Intel Sold?”
Micron’s New XPoint SSD Finally Arrives
At its October Insight Conference Micron Technology finally revealed its 3D XPoint SSD, dubbed the X100.
While the company didn’t disclose too much about the device, it did brag about its speed, claiming that the X100 is the world’s fastest SSD, running three times faster than the fastest NAND flash SSDs and almost three times the speed of other XPoint SSDs. The product is said to Continue reading “Micron’s New XPoint SSD Finally Arrives”
Podcast: Flash Memory Summit 2019
Those of you who enjoy listening to podcasts may want to hear Ray Lucchesi (Silverton Consulting) and Keith Townsend (The CTO Advisor) interview The SSD Guy for their series “Greybeards on Storage.”
This interview is the series’ 86th 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 40-minute compendium of the sights and goings-on at the August 2019 Flash Memory Summit along with observations on the industry in general. 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 Continue reading “Podcast: Flash Memory Summit 2019”
SSDs Need Controllers with More, NO! Less Power
The Storage Developer Conference in September gave a rare glimpse into two very different directions that SSD architectures are pursuing. While some of the conference’s presentations touted SSDs with increasing processing power (Eideticom, NGD, Samsung, and ScaleFlux) other presentations advocated moving processing power out of the SSD and into the host server (Alibaba, CNEX, and Western Digital).
Why would either of these make sense?
A standard SSD has a very high internal bandwidth that encounters a bottleneck as data is forced through a narrower interface. It’s easy to see that an SSD with 20+ NAND chips, each with an 8-bit interface, could access all 160 bits simultaneously. Since there’s already a processor inside the SSD, why not open it to external programming so that it can perform certain tasks within the SSD itself and harness all of that bandwidth?
Example tasks would include Continue reading “SSDs Need Controllers with More, NO! Less Power”
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”
