Items tagged with SLC
Earlier this year, Samsung made major waves with the introduction of its 850 Pro SSD and the first commercial iteration of 3D stacked flash memory. Now, Micron is striking back with lower-geometry conventional NAND -- and new drive technology it claims will accelerate performance more effectively than other competing solutions. The new M600 drive family will launch at capacities from 128GB to 1TB across multiple form factors. mSATA, 2.5-inch conventional mobile drives, and the PCIe-capable M.2 platform are all supported with multiple drive sizes and form factors, as shown below. The M600 uses Micron's 16nm NAND, which will allow the drive to hit a better cost-per-GB than previous products. One...
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Marvell is launching a new line of SSD cache accelerators for enterprise storage arrays that it believes could dramatically reduce the cost of deployment and significantly improve performance. The two new devices, dubbed the DragonFly NVRAM and DragonFly NVCache, are meant to solve the same sorts of problems as the consumer-oriented Corsair Cache Accelerators we've reviewed. but on a far larger scale -- and with a lot more firepower. You can't swing a dead cat more than six inches these days without slamming into someone's new cloud service. This is partly due to the reckless enthusiasm of marketing departments who've fallen all over themselves to rebrand the exact same products with a...
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A few years back we attended an Intel IDF event in San Francisco and among other disclosures, behind closed doors, the company was showing off a PCI Express-based SSD with current generation Intel NAND Flash and based on an array of SandForce controllers. As it turns out, that product never saw the light of day and was more of a demonstration and proof of concept vehicle for Intel than anything else. We've heard rumblings of Intel PCI Express SSD devices since then but nothing materialized much until very recently when Intel stepped out with a full-fledged product announcement of their SSD 910 family of Solid State Drives. To be honest, it was out of the blue, though we like...
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A couple of years back we attended an IDF event in San Francisco, and among other disclosures, behind closed doors the company was showing off a PCI Express-based SSD with current generation Intel NAND Flash and based on an array of SandForce controllers. As it turns out, that product never saw the light of day and was more of a demonstration and proof of concept vehicle for Intel than anything else. We've heard rumblings of Intel PCI Express SSD devices since then but nothing materialized until very recently when Intel stepped out with a full-fledged product announcement of their SSD 910 family of Solid State Drives. Of course, with the significant traction PCI Express SSDs...
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Intel has historically stuck with SATA-based solid state storage solutions, but today the company is taking a difference approach with its first PCI-Express solid state storage device. Like the SSD 710 family of products, the newly announced Intel SSD 910 is based on 25nm MLC NAND Flash. The two product families share a number of other low level features as well, but should offer very different performance levels. With the 710 Series, Intel focused on reliability and enterprise-level endurance and less on speed; the 910 PCI-Express SSD promises to deliver on both fronts... Intel Announces PCI Express SSD 910 Product Family...
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Intel has historically stuck with SATA-based solid state storage solutions, but today the company is taking a different approach with its first PCI-Express solid state storage device. Like the SSD 710 family of products, the newly announced Intel SSD 910 is based on 25nm MLC NAND Flash. The two product families share a number of other low level features as well, but should offer very different performance levels. With the 710 Series, Intel focused on reliability and enterprise-level endurance and less on speed; the 910 PCI-Express SSD promises to deliver on both fronts. The Intel SSD 910 is a triple-layer stack of NAND chips that fits into a single PCI-Express slot. The drive will be...
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GridIron Systems announced that it has hit a performance milestone with MLC flash technology: 1 million IOPS (inputs/outputs per second). The company is touting the breakthrough as a way for data centers to dramatically reduce hardware footprints and improve performance, as MLC flash is relatively inexpensive but increasingly has decent capacity and now, sizzling-fast performance. GridIron achieved 1 million IOPS with its Set-Ranking silicon, data analytics, and optimized handling of flash media. The company believes MLC flash to be the superior technology over the likes of SLC flash, and it’s planning on releasing a Big Data acceleration product based on the aforementioned technologies...
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NAND Flash and SSDs have become the darling of enthusiasts in recent years, thanks to a potent combination of improved read/write performance, virtually no latency, and lower power consumption compared to hard drives. A new report from the University of California San Diego, however, casts doubt on the long-term scalability of the format. The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS)' most recent report backs up such statements. Flash's fundamental problem is that the same technological innovations that are improving performance, power consumption, and cutting costs are also biting into its durability. The problem is illustrated in the graph below. Note that the best results,...
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SandForce's SF-1200 and SF-2200 controllers have popularized SSD's in recent years by offering excellent performance even in lower cost drives. The company is building on that success now with a new, enterprise-oriented chip designed for cloud computing environments. The SF-2481 is designed to offer SLC levels of reliability while using cheaper MLC NAND flash. "As the SSD market matures, architectures are being developed to satisfy the specific needs of various market segments," said Jim Handy, SSD analyst for Objective Analysis. "SandForce is wisely targeting one of the most important SSD markets by tuning a variant of its high-performance SSD Processor to the needs of the Internet data center....
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Seagate issued a general announcement yesterday in an apparent attempt to clarify its SSD plans going forward. Of all the various hard drive vendors, Seagate has been by far the most acrimonious towards SSD development; former CEO Bill Watkins' plans for dealing with the introduction of SSDs was to threaten to sue the companies out of existence. Watkins is gone, but Seagate has barely dipped a toe into the SSD market. Seagate's latest official press release statement attempts to justify the company's decision to mostly ignore SSDs in favor of conventional hard drives or hybrid drives. ...the yawning gulf between NAND flash memory production capacity for solid state drives and demand for laptop...
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Super Talent Announces Enterprise Class TeraDrive SSDs based on SandForce SSD Processor New SSDs Deliver Extreme IOPS and Outstanding Reliability San Jose, California - January 21, 2010 - Super Talent Technology, a leading manufacturer of Flash storage solutions and DRAM memory modules, today announced a new line of TeraDrive SSDs designed specifically for high end enterprise and database server applications. "Super Talent has a solid track record of developing leading edge SSDs. Their new TeraDrive series, incorporating SandForce technology, is an impressive advance in enterprise storage" commented Thad Omura, VP Marketing at SandForce Inc. The new TeraDrive FT2 is a SATA 3Gbps SSD based on...
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OCZ Technology Showcases Cutting-Edge SSD Technology and other Leading Solutions at CES 2010 San Jose, Calif. - January 6, 2010 - OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a worldwide leader in innovative, ultra-high performance and high reliability memory and flash-based storage as an alternative to hard disk drives, plans to unveil an array of next generation solid state drives (SSDs) along with other premium hardware at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada. With its finger on the pulse of emerging and booming markets, OCZ’s impending line of SSDs are designed to optimize entire businesses as well as the computing experiences of everyday consumers. “This CES we continue to build...
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Until recently, the price gap between SLC and MLC based solid state drives has been massive. Single-level cell drives can cost anywhere from three to four times the price of multi-level cell SSDs of the same capacity. Even for the most extreme hardware enthusiasts, it made very little sense to splurge on an SLC drive considering the value, size, and continuous performance enhancements occurring in MLC products. But now, OCZ aims to fill the price gap with the release of the most affordable SLC drive on the market. The Agility EX Series SSD features a 60GB capacity, 64MB cache, and the popular Indilinx Barefoot controller. Advertised performance is expectedly impressive, with read speed up to...
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When shopping for an SSD, consumers are confronted with two general options: single-level cell (SLC) or multi-level cell (MLC) flash memory based drives. The market is filled with numerous drives featuring MLC chips that are primarily aimed at more mainstream users. These products are typically less expensive and offer larger capacities than their SLC-based counterparts. On the other hand, drives featuring SLC flash memory offer increased performance and greater reliability, but cost much more as a result of these advantages. Due to the high asking price, single-level cell SSDs typically target the enterprise market where the extended endurance feature is an important consideration. ...
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