PCIe SSDs – The SSD Guy Blog

New Study Forecasts Huge Enterprise SSD Growth

Objective Analysis has published a new study, Enterprise SSDs: Technologies & Markets.

This study breaks the market into 23 application types, and provides an explanation of each along with forecasts by major application category.

Virtualized systems will drive the greatest 5-year average unit shipment growth, at 85%, although the data center will retain its leadership in enterprise SSD consumption. Overall enterprise SSD unit shipments will grow at an annual average of 32% through 2018.

Since SSD prices are cost-based, with roughly 80% of the cost coming from flash chips, NAND flash price swings will cause Continue reading “New Study Forecasts Huge Enterprise SSD Growth”

One-Hop vs. Two-Hop PCIe SSDs

Lately a number of PCIe offerings have hit the SSD market. The SSD Guy breaks them into two camps: One-Hop SSDs, in which the commands are translated directly from PCIe to the NAND flash without going through an intermediary protocol, and Two-Hop SSDs, which use off-the-shelf HBAs and SATA SSD controllers to move commands first from PCIe to SATA then from SATA to NAND. There are aslo versions that go through SAS: PCIe to SAS, then SAS to NAND.

The SSD Guy figured that Easter would be a good time to talk about these since everyone already has the Easter Bunny hopping through their minds!

It’s not hard to understand why Continue reading “One-Hop vs. Two-Hop PCIe SSDs”