Micron Technology has produced a very good four-minute video that shows how SSDs are made. It starts with the design & manufacture of the NAND flash chips themselves and goes right through their assembly into SSDs, interspersing videos of manufacturing processes with graphics of the product’s operation.
This is on the SSD Guy’s recommended YouTube videos list. Check it out by clicking:
SSD-watchers have expressed some concern over the last few years that SSDs cannot be manufactured using advanced NAND flash process geometries. This is because these parts have lower endurance and a larger number of bit errors than NAND made using less-advanced processes – the tighter the process, the shorter the flash’s life, and the more errors it will have.
Fortunately these concerns seem to be Continue reading “19nm & 20nm SSDs Arrive!”
DensBits, a flash memory controller company, has just introduced its new DB3610 “Memory Modem” eMMC controller for 3-bit or TLC flash. The controller is the first to use DensBits’ new technology which the company claims can coax better reliability out of 3-bit flash than most controllers can out of 2-bit MLC, to provide important cost savings to OEMs.
Read and write performance is also said to be nearly on a par with 2-bit MLC.
DensBits’ Memory Modem is a blend of Continue reading “DensBits Debuts with eMMC Controller”
When I have a question about SSD retail pricing I know exactly who to consult. Andy Higgenbotham (pictured here) and his Price G2 service track HDD and SSD retail pricing and publish data to a very high degree of resolution.
Price G2 data has been used in another post in the blog: When Will SSD Prices Drop Below HDD Prices?
This company publishes weekly reports of pricing from all major HDD and SSD manufacturers (Seagate, Western Digital, Toshiba, Samsung, Intel, Micron, and the like) with information on market trends like this for the week of April 23:
Flat to increasing pricing continues throughout 2012. Only on the 512GB have we seen sustained price drops from Q1 and through Q2. The 512GB capacity currently sells for $1.05/GB in week 17.
Amid recent rumors of steep SSD price declines this service has served to disprove any notion that the SSD market is undergoing fundamental change. The SSD Guy highly recommends Price G2 for anyone whose business relies on timely and thorough HDD and SSD price tracking.
Intel has gotten into the fast-growing and lucrative market for PCIe SSDs. The company has announced a PCIe SSD, the 910, that provides the high performance you would expect of a PCIe drive with the quality guarantees that customers expect of Intel.
Who could blame them? Fusion-io has become a Wall Street darling for creating the PCIe SSD market, and still rides it to continually growing revenues. LSI is fascinated by the growth of its Warp Drive. Micron attained a significant design win at EMC, Texas Memory Systems (TMS) has had success in its own narrow markets, and Virident, OCZ, and STEC have also participated in the PCIe SSD’s market growth.
Intel’s 910 consists of four Hitachi SAS SSD Continue reading “Intel Jumps Into the PCIe SSD Market”
On April 3 & 4 Avnet Embedded will host an on-line conference called the SSD Virtual Summit. This free on-demand seminar will feature a keynote by Yours Truly, The SSD Guy, and presentations by leading SSD makers and related firms including Adaptech, Crucial, Dell, HGST, Intel, Kingston, LSI, Micron, OCZ, Rorke Data, Seagate, SMART Storage, STEC, and Toshiba.
Come join in to learn the latest information on SSDs.
During Micron Technology‘s quarterly earnings call an interesting tidbit was revealed: PC OEMs and Micron’s sales channel partners are carrying SSD inventory from panic buys they made in response to Thailand’s floods.
It seems that Micron’s OEMs and channel partners expected the HDD shortage that resulted from the floods to create new market opportunities for SSDs. This is not an uncommon notion, and it was first discussed by The SSD Guy in a blog post early last November with another post added in January. It seems that the messages of these posts didn’t reach those OEMs.
Micron mentioned this because Continue reading “Micron: SSD Over-Inventory at OEMs & Channel”
At The Consumer Electronics Show this week, Swiss army knife maker Victorinox introduced a one-terabyte SSD in a form factor similar to a fat Swiss army knife. Yes, that is right – a terabyte of NAND flash in your pocket. The company tells us that the device’s dimensions, including the connector, are a scant 52x18x10mm.
Some of the other features include the use of an eSATA connector (to allow the product to be plugged into either a SATA port or a USB socket), AES256 encryption (any army would like this), and a bi-stable LCD to tell how much free space remains on the device.
But let’s look at the difficulty of building a 1TB flash SSD in such a small space:
