Many enterprise SSD makers are familiar to storage folks like myself, including Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, Imation, Intel, Samsung, Seagate, and Toshiba. Readers of my blog may also recognize Fusion-io, LSI, Micron, OCZ Technology, Texas Memory Systems, and Viridant from my recent coverage, and may have heard of Solid Access Systems, Anobit, Pliant (now part of SanDisk), and others. But some names remain unfamiliar, at least for now. And others, notably Nimbus Data and Violin Memory, are puzzlingly missing from the StorageNewsletter list.

So here’s my rundown of the enterprise SSD makers to keep an eye on in the coming year!

For fun, I am grouping these by how much contact I had with them over the previous year. Although obviously not the most scientific measure of their impact on the storage world, perhaps this will help highlight those that are reaching out to independent bloggers like myself.

Well-Known SSD Players

See also Micron Bursts Into the PCIe SSD Market

First up is a group of companies that I’m quite familiar with, having recently been briefed on their SSD plans and products.

1. LSI
2. Micron
3. Nimbus Data
4. Texas Memory Systems

Next is a list of companies that, although I have contacts of one sort or another, I eagerly anticipate future briefings regarding SSD technology.

1. Anobit
2. Intel
3. Fusion-io
4. Hitachi GST
5. Seagate Technology
6. Stec
7. Violin Memory

SSD Contenders

See also Toshiba Offers “Blade” SSDs (Like Apple’s MacBook Air)

I have spotted the following companies at conferences, in industry publications, and on the web and feel that I am somewhat familiar with their SSD plans. But I welcome any opportunity to get to know them better, and encourage them to contact me via e-mail or by telephone.

1. OCZ Technology
2. Imation
3. Samsung
4. SanDisk / Pliant Technology
5. Solid Access
6. Toshiba
7. Viking Modular Solutions
8. Virident Systems

Who?!?

I was surprised to see this set of companies listed in the StorageNewsletter article, and more surprised when I went to their website and found that they were working on genuine and interesting enterprise SSD products. I would love to get in contact with folks at these companies so I can learn more about what they are up to!

1. BiTMICRO Networks
2. Foremay
3. Macrotron Systems
4. pureSilicon
5. RunCore
6. Smart Modular Technologies
7. Super Talent

Stephen’s Stance

In all, I located 25 companies that build solid-state storage devices for the enterprise market. My quick examination of their websites (or previous knowledge of the companies) reveals a wonderful and vibrant culture of innovation around solid-state storage technology. Watch this space over the next year, since I intend to cover the SSD space in detail!

I would like to thank Jean-Jacques Maleval for spurring my research into these enterprise SSD companies. He is really doing a great job over at StorageNewsletter, and I recommend that you subscribe!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | My Incomplete, Subjective List of Enterprise SSD Companies
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Personal, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

This post is part of my series focused on the MacBook Pro.

• Don’t Be Jealous Of The New MacBook Pros!
• Upgraded! 320 GB in a MacBook Pro!
• SanDisk ExpressCard Flash Media Adapter: Nifty MacBook Pro Accessory!
• How I Get 7 Hours of MacBook Pro Battery Life
• Panic! Green Light and MacBook Pro Keyboard is Half Dead!
• Low-Power USB Ports Haunt My MacBook Pro

Card Slot In Card Slot

Apple has equipped the MacBook Pro line with an integrated ExpressCard slot since the very first post-PowerBook model back in 2006. This new expansion card form factor has never been as popular as PCMCIA/CardBus was on the laptops of the early part of the decade. So, for mid-2009, Apple decided to drop the slot altogether for all models but the massive 17″ MacBook Pro. In its place is an SD card slot, popular with the digital camera set.

Part of the blame lies in the increasing integration of features in modern machines: Users no longer need the slot to add a network adapter, Wi-Fi, audio, or optical drive since they’re all built in! Another huge factor is USB 2.0: It’s fast enough for just about any remaining peripheral.

There are only three urgent uses for an ExpressCard slot in a modern laptop:

1. Adding 3G wireless networking capability to systems (like Apple’s) that lack built-in 3G cards. Of course, many folks choose a USB 3G modem, and I’m in love with my Cradlepoint 3G wireless router.
2. Adding a second video adapter and external monitor. Modern MacBooks work great out of the box with two monitors, though, if you count the built-in LCD! And the new USB video adapters seem to work fairly well, too.
3. Adding more high-speed ports like e-SATA or FireWire 800. Although the MacBook Pro has two USB 2.0 ports, both are compromised in terms of speed or power. All of the new Pro models (even the new 13″) now include FireWire 800, but e-SATA is still AWOL.

The ExpressCard flash media adapter snaps in place and is flush with the edge of the MacBook Pro - very clean!

I didn’t need any of these features with my MacBook Pro: My Sprint 3G card is connected to the Cradlepoint router, I am happy to use the built-in LCD for multi-monitor desktop use, and I don’t need more FireWire or e-SATA storage. But, as I noted back in October, I did find a great use for the ExpressCard slot: An SD media card reader! That’s right: My now-old Mac features the exact same function that Apple just added!

I love having the convenience of an SD slot when it comes to importing photos from my Canon PowerShot cameras: It’s quick, the cards open right up in iPhoto, and I don’t have to carry any cables with me. Adding an SD card reader was cheap and easy, too! Amazon sells the exact same Sandisk SDAD109A11 adapter I bought for around $40. They’ve also got a Sonnet SD adapter (which I haven’t tried) for under $30!

I Have The Power!

Massive battery life is another solid addition to the mid-2009 MacBook Pro line. Apple integrates a huge battery right into the laptop, and reports indicate it really does deliver 7 or 8 hours of runtime. This is the first laptop I can think of without an easily replaceable battery, and follows Apple’s similar moves with the iPod and iPhone lines. Expect this to be copied by other manufacturers in the future!

My secret to long (battery) life and happiness!

Although my MacBook Pro lasts three to four hours on a charge, I purchased a second battery from the Apple store to help me work on the go. This has proven an excellent investment, and I have come to rely on battery power more than I thought I would. I have spent entire trans-Atlantic flights with the computer up and running, and have touched 8 hours of run time with two fully-charged batteries. Although extra batteries are not cheap (Amazon lists mine at $120), they’re much less expensive than they used to be!

If you do decide to get an extra battery for your older MacBook, here are some tips:

1. Get the original equipment Apple battery, not a third-party workalike. I’ve always had bad luck with off-brand batteries, and they’re not that much cheaper.
2. Download a copy of SmartSleep, the awesome and free sleep/hibernate utility. I have mine set to hibernate below 5% charge so I can swap batteries without losing data.
3. If you don’t want to wait for hibernation, just leave the Mac plugged in when you swap batteries. You can do this while it’s running or while it’s plugged in but asleep.

Sure, the cool unibody case and faster performance is tempting. But I’m still pretty happy with my good old MacBook Pro!

Note: Some of these links include affiliate codes that help pay for this blog. For example, buying an Amazon Kindle with this link sends a few bucks my way! But I don't write this blog to make money, and am happy to link to sites and stores that don't pay anything. I like Amazon and buy tons from them, but you're free to buy whatever and wherever you want.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Don’t Be Jealous Of The New MacBook Pros!
This post was categorized as Apple. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

As I mentioned the other day, I recently picked up a Canon ultra-compact digital camera to use while on the road. What I didn’t mention is that I also grabbed a nifty new accessory for the MacBook Pro: A SanDisk ExpressCard flash media adapter. This little gadget converts a notebook’s ExpressCard slot into a versatile flash media adapter – it takes most versions of SD and Memory Stick, and works in both OS X and Windows without a hiccup (or even a driver install).

This post is part of my series focused on the MacBook Pro.

• Don’t Be Jealous Of The New MacBook Pros!
• Upgraded! 320 GB in a MacBook Pro!
• SanDisk ExpressCard Flash Media Adapter: Nifty MacBook Pro Accessory!
• How I Get 7 Hours of MacBook Pro Battery Life
• Panic! Green Light and MacBook Pro Keyboard is Half Dead!
• Low-Power USB Ports Haunt My MacBook Pro

Of course, I could just carry around a cable and use the camera as a media reader. But that’s one more tangled item in the rat’s nest for airport security to flag. Besides, that ExpressCard slot was just sitting there doing nothing – what’s a geek to do?

ExpressCard is a really weird technology, by the way. It’s actually two slots in one, from both a physical and electrical perspective. Physically, there are two different card sizes – the slim “34″ type seen here, and a wider (but notched) “54″ version. The MacBook Pro and my Dells have just the narrow ExpressCard/34 version, and most cards are of this type as well. But the weird thing is the electrical connection: ExpressCards can have either a PCI Express or USB connection! So this little card reader is nothing more than a USB card reader built into a tiny metal card. This is why it doesn’t need a driver for most modern OSes, and why it was so cheap. One more thing – unlike PCMCIA/CardBus cards, which are held in by friction, ExpressCard has a nice positive push-and-click engagement in the slot.

The ExpressCard flash media adapter snaps in place and is flush with the edge of the MacBook Pro - very clean!

Note: Some of these links include affiliate codes that help pay for this blog. For example, buying an Amazon Kindle with this link sends a few bucks my way! But I don't write this blog to make money, and am happy to link to sites and stores that don't pay anything. I like Amazon and buy tons from them, but you're free to buy whatever and wherever you want.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | SanDisk ExpressCard Flash Media Adapter: Nifty MacBook Pro Accessory!
This post was categorized as Apple, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Note: This didn’t happen. It was merely a rumor.

The stock market was alive with rumors that Seagate might be bought by an unnamed Chinese company, as reported in the New York Times, among others. This comes after a week of insider whispers about a possible tieup between Seagate and memory-makers, Micron or SanDisk, itself a Seagate spin-off. It seems that the hot disk drive and flash memory markets are shaking as sales heat up and margins thin out. Note that this is far from a done-deal. Rather, Seagate CEO, William Watkins, was merely noting in an interview that there was such an inquiry.

To my eyes, a Seagate buy-out would be little different from the sale of IBM’s disk drive operations to Hitachi back in 2002 or their sale of the PC group to Lenovo two years later. Seagate is a component maker, and although it is a critical piece of the storage industry it is not really a strategic entity. Certainly, the company’s contributions to standards like SATA, SAS, and (yes) hybrid drives are worthwhile, but apart from evault, the company contributes little to the value-added services landscape.

Still, if a buy-out softened scrappy Seagate I would miss the healthy contribution between them, Western Digital, Hitachi, and the other disk vendors. And it would be an end of an era, with Alan Shugart‘s old company going the way of MG Rover and the rest.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2007. | Seagate Going to China?
This post was categorized as Computer History, Enterprise storage, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Tom’s Hardware, one of my favorite nests of geeks, tested a pair of these 32 GB SanDisk drives and came out with some interesting findings. Notable among their findings is the fact that the pathetic random write throughput makes SSDs totally unsuitable to server (read enterprise storage) applications. How does 40 I/O operations per second strike you? Yes, that’s 40, and it’s due to the inherent nature of NAND flash memory and its organization in SSDs. RAID helps some and hurts some – it spreads the load, improving performance, but makes sequential writes even less likely.

But these drive mechanisms aren’t meant for this kind of load – they’re meant for laptops and gamer PCs which heavily lean toward random reads, an area in which solid state disks excel. “Boot Windows in half the time!” (unless you’re comparing the SSD to an actual high-performance disk)

There’s also a little issue of reliability. Well, actually, let’s say longevity. You see, a NAND flash cell is still good for only about 10,000 writes before it becomes a lump. This isn’t much of a problem in a thumb drive or iPod since these don’t actually get written to all that much. Plus, all current SSDs include “wear leveling”, a strategy that maximizes write longevity by moving blocks (on write) to less-used flash cells. So a bigger flash device actually lasts much longer than a smaller one under the same I/O profile because all those extra cells can give their little lives to save your data.

This longevity issue isn’t just academic. Ask anyone with an Unslung NSLU2 booting from a flash drive (yeah, including me) and you’ll hear about failed thumb drives after a year or two of use. No big deal when you’re talking about a $15 item, but what about enterprise storage? I guess EMC and IBM wouldn’t mind forcing you to replace your enterprise storage media every year or two, but how will you feel about it? And what if the NAND was soldered to your motherboard when it failed? Makes Apple’s sealed iPod/iPhone batteries seem trivial, doesn’t it?

Then there’s the issue of cost. A 32 GB SATA SSD drive runs $400 retail, which is about how much you’d pay for a 300 GB SATA 2.5″ laptop drive (if you didn’t get a good deal). In other words, it costs about 10 times more than a comparable spinning drive on a per-GB basis. Lots of companies are investing in flash (iPod effect, anyone?) but NAND prices are not promising to overtake disks any time soon. So we’re left with an exceptionally flawed product.

Of course these drives have no cache – it’s irrelevant, say the manufacturers, in a solid-state device. But write cache might actually improve random write performance substantially, especially if it was backed by a super-smart algorithm to maximize sequential I/O in the same way that Network Appliance’s WAFL optimizes RAID-4.

And if this software also included the wear-leveling smarts, things would be even better. Imagine optimizing writes to kill a single NAND module quickly, sparing the rest of the array. Think tiered storage for longevity instead of cost – frequent write I/O operations go to the sacrificial cells and longer-lasting ones are destaged to the “permanent” ones. Makes media replacement much more palatable, doesn’t it? Add in some smarts and a sizable write-back cache to keep the really transient writes off the flash entirely and you might have something there.

As for cost, consider Mark Lewis’ recent posting about OLTP versus “web” data. He’s telegraphing EMC’s playbook for SSD – smart tiered storage that places small amounts of OLTP data on smart NAND and everything else on regular disks. Sounds workable to me!

One more point to make. Rumor has it, disk giant Seagate is thinking of snapping up memory specialist, Micron. If this isn’t a sign that solid state tech is becoming important to the storage component industry, I don’t know what it is!

So I’m still not too positive on SSD technology. It’ll always be more costly, and the current offerings are woefully inadequate. But I can see a way to make it work in enterprise storage, and I see signs that the big companies are trying to do just that. Wake me when the train arrives, ok?

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2007. | Commercial SSDs Are Here?
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.