SanDisk – The SSD Guy Blog

WDC: No SSD/HDD Crossover

Those who have been reading posts on The SSD Guy blog for some time have often heard me explain that SSD prices will not fall below HDD prices anytime soon. Last week Western Digital shared a roadmap that shows that we can expect for there to be a sizeable price gap between the two technologies at least through 2028.

Let me stop for a moment to point out that Western Digital Corp, or WDC, no longer has any reason to take sides in the HDD vs. SSD battle now that the company has acquired SanDisk, a leading SSD maker. Even before that, WDC’s HGST business has been the market leader in SAS SSDs for a number of years. WDC doesn’t take sides in arguments about SSDs vs. HDDs. Instead the company stands ready to sell whichever one the customer finally decides to use.

This post’s graphic comes from a chart that WDC used on October 11 when introducing its new MAMR head technology, which the company expects to propel HDD capacities up, and HDD price per terabyte down, for a number of years. To create this chart WDC’s HDD team joined forces with the SanDisk flash team to project both HDD and NAND price per terabyte for the next 11 years. The most important conclusion is that Continue reading “WDC: No SSD/HDD Crossover”

SanDisk: SSD at HDD Prices

Yesterday SanDisk announced a new low-end family of SSDs that the company said would sell: “at a price point on par with HDDs. (Pricing comparison dependent upon capacity.)” The sub-headline states: “Z400s SSD Brings New Levels of Affordability to Replace Hard Drives…”

The release provided no actual prices to back up this claim.

So how does this work? Can you actually now buy a 1TB SSD for cheaper than a 1TB HDD? Not at all. Instead you have to look at things a little differently using a concept that I frequently explained five years ago when SSDs were pretty new – that very low capacity SSDs can be cheaper than HDDs.

This post’s graph plots this out. It’s a chart of HDD and SSD prices over a range of capacities. It’s on a log-log scale, but it works well on a standard linear chart as well. Note that prices are for 2010, and prices have come down significantly for both SSDs and HDDs since then. This means that the numbers on the X and Y axes need adjustment to bring them to today’s levels, but the shape of the curves would remain the same.

The red line represents SSD costs over the range of capacities, and the black line represents HDDs. Although HDDs are cheaper than SSDs Continue reading “SanDisk: SSD at HDD Prices”

SanDisk Rolls Out InfiniFlash

The following post is an excerpt of an article Objective Analysis submitted to the Pund-IT Weekly Review for 11 March, 2015.

With a webcast in the style of the big system makers like EMC and Oracle, SanDisk announced its InfiniFlash flash appliance. InfiniFlash is a box that crams a whopping 500 terabytes into only 3U of rack space.

How big is 500 terabytes? It’s more bytes than SanDisk’s entire flash output for 2001.

SanDisk boasts that InfiniFlash is a “category-defining product”, and pointed to the fact that IDC, who provided support for the roll-out, created a new “Big Data Flash” storage product category for this device.

The system boasts performance of one million random-read IOPS, which is impressive, but doesn’t give much indication of how it performs in standard enterprise dataflow, which is generally assumed to consist of a 70/30 split of reads and writes. (I should mention here that Objective Analysis published a survey of users’ IOPS and latency needs which can be purchased on our website.)

Price is a major focus for this product. SanDisk says that it will sell systems bundled with software at less than Continue reading “SanDisk Rolls Out InfiniFlash”

SanDisk: We’ll Upgrade Your PCs For You!

In a move that The SSD Guy wishes he had thought of for himself, SanDisk has begun to help corporations upgrade their fleets of notebook PCs by replacing their HDDs with SSDs.

SanDisk calls this program STAR for: “SanDisk Tech-Assisted Refresh”. According to the press release: “Through the STAR program, SanDisk relieves IT departments of having to manage all aspects of upgrading corporate laptops such as, endpoint inventory analysis, employee service scheduling, system upgrades, data migration, daily progress reporting, post-upgrade analysis and support.”

SanDisk points out that PCs slow down with disk utilization and software updates, lowering users’ productivity. Often faster storage can solve that problem.

This is not an altogether new Continue reading “SanDisk: We’ll Upgrade Your PCs For You!”

How Big Can an SSD Get?

Someone recently asked The SSD Guy to guess what would be the largest amount of flash that could be fit into an SSD’s case. This sounded like a fun problem, so I did a “Back-of-the-Envelope” estimate to try and figure it out.

First of all, I would judge by this post’s picture that you could get no more than 20 chip packages (4 x 5) on one side of a PC board for a 2.5″ SSD. That’s probably an optimistic estimate.

If you ignore the controller that would allow you to squeeze 40 packages onto a single circuit board.

Certain high-capacity SSDs use a “Butterfly” design to fit three circuit boards into a single 2.5″ HDD housing. With three 40-package circuit boards you could fit 120 chip packages into the 2.5″ HDD housing.

Today’s densest flash chip stores 128 gigabits or 16 gigabytes. Samsung and SanDisk can stack 16 of these chips within a single package, making a 16 x 16 gigabyte or 256 gigabyte package. SanDisk just announced a 512 gigabyte SD Card that doubles Continue reading “How Big Can an SSD Get?”

SanDisk’s 3-Bit SSD, the Ultra II

SanDisk has just introduced the Ultra II SSD, an upgrade of the company’s original Ultra drive. The new device is being promoted as a 28 times faster HDD replacement that offers faster boot-up, longer battery life, and shock resistance, in an approach that appears to be a throwback to the early days of SSDs where the point was to sell the technology rather than the product. Although the press release shows sequential read & write bandwidth numbers of 550 and 500MB/s, neither the press release nor the online product literature even mention IOPS or other measures that are now commonly used to compare one SSD against the other.

SanDisk does tout the fact that this SSD uses Continue reading “SanDisk’s 3-Bit SSD, the Ultra II”

White Paper: Matching Flash to the Processor

I have just added a new white paper onto the Objective Analysis website: Matching Flash to the Processor – Why Multithreading Needs Parallelized Flash.

This document examines the evolution of today’s CPUs, whose clock frequencies have stopped increasing, but now exploit parallelism to scale performance. Multiple DRAM channels have also been added to performance computing to add parallelism to the memory channel.

Storage hasn’t kept pace with this move to parallelism and that is limiting today’s systems.

New NAND flash DIMMs recently introduced by Diablo, SanDisk, and IBM, provide a reasonable approach to adding parallel flash to a system on the its fastest bus – the memory channel. This white paper shows that storage can be scaled to match the processor’s growing performance by adding flash DIMMs to each of the many DRAM buses in a performance server.

The white paper is downloadable for free from the Objective Analysis home page. Have a look.

IBM Launches Flash DIMMs

On Thursday IBM announced its X6 product family, the sixth generation of the company’s successful EXA server architecture. A smaller byline of the introduction was the company’s new eXFlash memory-channel storage or eXFlash DIMM which is offered as one of many flash options available to X6 users.

Close followers of The SSD Guy already know that I am a serious advocate of putting flash onto the memory bus. Why slow the technology down by Continue reading “IBM Launches Flash DIMMs”

SanDisk to Acquire SMART Storage

The following is excerpted from an Objective Analysis Alert e-mailed to our clients on 2 July, 2013:

SanDisk Corporation announced on 2 July 2013 an agreement to acquire SMART Storage Systems, the SSD arm of SMART Modular Technologies, for $307 million in cash and equity. The transaction is expected to close in August, 2013.

SMART has strong SSD technology that allows the company to ship MLC-based SSDs with endurance specifications superior to those of some SLC SSDs. The SSD maker had shipments of about $25M in its most recent quarter.

The SMART acquisition will be the fourth Continue reading “SanDisk to Acquire SMART Storage”

19nm & 20nm SSDs Arrive!

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!”