Brian's Brain

I previously pointed to a late-April post from StorageMojo (Robin Harris) as partial motivation for my own SSD-vs-HDD analysis, and apparently I wasn't the only one spurred to write by Harris' perspectives. StorageMojo subsequently published a two-part point-by-point response from an anonymous semiconductor vendor representative, which I commend to your inspection. While it echoes many of the insights I shared in my writeup regarding solid-state storage capacity, performance, power consumption and reliability trends, it's still interesting to hear them coming 'straight from the horse's mouth', as it were.

Speaking of mass storage reliability, and as followup to another recent writeup of mine, check out the referenced article and community discussion about hard drive data recovery deriving from a mid-May Slashdot showcase. Whereas my post mentioned Kroll Ontrack, the Slashdot link points to DriveSavers; I suspect that the two companies employ conceptually similar restoration techniques.

I admit to a longstanding particular skepticism that SSDs will make a big splash in enterprise storage, by virtue of the especially enthusiastic capacity demands of that segment of the business. On the other hand, I admit that power consumption (along with closely related heat dissipation) is of critical concern in the datacenter, and such setups are also less price-sensitive than more consumer-oriented storage applications. With those seemingly contradictory perspectives in mind, check out EMC's thoughts on the subject, as passed along by Ars Technica (and here's more on SSDs at EMC from Slashdot).

Finally, I confess to no shortage of admiration for Samsung's latest SSD 'paper' accomplishment, a 256 GByte slim 2.5" drive with SATA II system interface and claimed 200 MByte/sec sequential read speed and 160 MByte/sec sequential write speed.

Pricing isn't yet available, alas, and sampling won't happen until at least September (with full production forecasted for year end, along with a 1.8" variant). As such, don't get too excited; Samsung's track record at delivering on its mass storage claims is mixed at best, at least with respect to the HDD division (the semiconductor gang tends to do a better job at executing on its promises, and I'm not sure which product group SSDs fall under). Also, don't overlook the emphasis on sequential (versus random) accesses in the unveiled specifications. But note that the drive's estimable performance (along with a 1 million hour MTBF estimate) exists in spite of the fact that, to boost capacity and reduce cost-per-GByte, Samsung employed multi-level-cell flash memory technology versus the inherently faster (and more reliable) single-level-cell media.

p.s...check out Dean Takahashi's interesting interview with solid state storage-vendor-sueing Seagate CEO, Bill Watkins (I'm with StorageMojo, by the way; I don't think the patents are defensible given all the industry prior art).