For the past several years presenters at data-oriented conferences have quoted forecasts for data growth that taxed their vocabularies. Exabytes gave way to Zettabytes, and then Yottabytes, and these were often charted out on standard linear charts like the one below, with the inevitable result that Continue reading “Dealing with a Data Shortage”
Tag: April Fool’s
Replacing Tape with Flash
It’s not that often that a new technology comes as a complete surprise to The SSD Guy, especially one that is only a year away from shipping, and that promises to revolutionize the world of storage. Yet, today a new start-up arrived that promises all of this. It has really captured my attention.
This technology is aimed at the market for long-venerated Continue reading “Replacing Tape with Flash”
High Availability in an m.2 Format
The m.2 SSD format has become wildly successful in the data center for use as a boot drive and even in SSD arrays. The m.2 format supports either the SATA or the NVMe interface, Something that has been missing, however, is a version of this format for high-availability (HA) systems. These are mission-critical systems that cannot fail, no matter what.
Until today HA systems had to Continue reading “High Availability in an m.2 Format”
HDD & SSD Combined Into One
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”
