Back in August, at the FMS show, keynoters surprised their audiences with promises of upcoming 100 million IOPS SSDs. Given that today’s highest-performing SSDs provide well under ten million IOPS, how will SSD makers reach this very challenging goal?
We can gain some insight into this from a little information in a Continue reading “100 Million IOPS SSDs? You Must be Kidding!”
Meta recently published a blog post that proposes adding a QLC SSD layer between HDD and TLC SSDs. The post, titled “A Case for QLC SSDs in the Data Center,” argues that a QLC SSD layer between a system’s TLC SSDs and its HDDs can help improve Meta’s overall system cost/performance ratio.
The SSD Guy finds that this Continue reading “Meta: Adding a QLC Layer for Better Cost/Performance”
When the switch is made from HDDs to SSDs in most applications there are usually very strong benefits, but in the case of spacecraft, SSDs are causing no end of trouble.
Sure, SSDs provide certain extraordinary performance and other technical benefits. Of particular importance in space applications are the facts that they consume less power, they are more resilient to the high g-forces endured during launch, and, most importantly, they weigh less than HDDs, which is extraordinarily valuable when it costs tens of dollars per gram to put satellites into orbit. The big drawback is that Continue reading “Why SSDs are Problematic in Space”
Solidigm has unveiled a hot-swappable liquid-cooled enterprise SSD. The company expects for this to help remove any need for cooling fans and allow designers to create fully liquid-cooled AI servers and storage systems. They took some time to brief The SSD Guy about their new approach to heat removal.
Here’s what they were looking to accomplish: Hyperscalers and other large computing installations would like Continue reading “A Liquid Cooled SSD, AND It’s Hot Swappable!”
AI is on everyone’s minds these days, and SSD makers have lately been touting certain models, explaining that they have been designed for AI applications. Why would that be? Is there a difference between AI SSDs and those used for conventional applications?
The answers to both questions would be “Yes,” and in this post The SSD Guy will attempt to explain why in a Continue reading “Why Does AI Need Different SSDs?”
With all the recent interest in CXL, and its ability to connect a processor to any memory, no matter the speed, it’s only natural that someone would try using it for SSDs. This notion is the basis for the Memory-Semantic SSD, or MS-SSD.
But MS-SSDs suffer from the same problem as SSDs, hard drives, and other mass storage. The basic concept requires Continue reading “NVMe-oC: Wolley’s New Take on CXL-Based SSDs”
One of the most compelling keynotes at the Flash Memory Summit last August was presented by SSD controller maker FADU Technology and social media giant Meta (Facebook). These two companies were advocating a new way of managing SSDs called: “Flexible Data Placement.” The SSD Guy believes that these two companies’ findings are pretty remarkable and well worth sharing.
Ross Stenfort from Meta presented a timeline showing that since 2019 Meta and Microsoft (Azure) have been working Continue reading “Flexible Data Placement Means Better SSDs”
For a long time, The SSD Guy has been talking about Write Amplification without explaining what It is. This post is intended to fix that.
Write amplification is an internal issue for NAND flash SSDs that arises from the way that NAND chips work. It doesn’t exist in standard HDDs, nor did it exist in DRAM SSDs before we had NAND ones. In a nutshell it’s the Continue reading “What is Write Amplification?”
Mardi Gras is a good time for The SSD Guy to bend your mind. It’s the day before Ash Wednesday kicks off Lent, the penitential season leading up to Easter.
And it never seems to happen on the same date.
I will compare SSD garbage collection to the timing of the Lenten season and Easter. There are surprising similarities.
Very few people understand Continue reading “Mardi Gras vs. SSD Garbage Collection”
Micron presented something really interesting during the company’s Investor Day Conference last week, but it didn’t seem to get any press coverage. The company naturally repeated its plan to become a more important supplier of data center SSDs, but what The SSD Guy was most interested in were a few comments they gave for choosing to make vertically-integrated SSDs. Micron now makes not only the NAND and the DRAM internal to its SSDs, but also the controller.
Why would a company Continue reading “Smarter NAND for Better SSDs”
