Western Digital (WD) announced their first SSD drive for the desktop/laptop market space today.  Their drive offers the typical256, 128, and 64GB capacity points over a SATA interface.  Performance looks ok at 5K random read or write IO/s with sustained transfers at 250 and 140MB/s for read and write respectively.  But what caught my eye [...]

Intel-Micron Flash Technologies just issued another increase in NAND density. This one’s manages to put 8GB on a single chip with MLC(2) technology in a 167mm square package or roughly a half inch per side.
You may recall that Intel-Micron Flash Technologies (IMFT) is a joint venture between Intel and Micron to develop NAND technology [...]

A head assembly on a Seagate disk drive by Robert Scoble (cc) (from flickr)

I was reading about pythons becoming an invasive species in the Florida Everglades and that brought to mind SSDs.  The current ecological niche in data storage has rotating media as the most prolific predator with tape going on the endangered species list [...]

Today Toshiba announced a new series of SSD drives based on their 32NM MLC NAND technology. The new technology is interesting but what caught my eye was another part of their website, i.e., their SSD FAQs. We have talked about MLC NAND technology before and have discussed its inherent reliability limitations, but this [...]

Today Seagate announced their new SSD offering, named the Pulsar SSD.  It uses SLC NAND technology and comes in a 2.5″ form factor at 50, 100 or 200GB capacity.  The fact that it uses a 3GB/s SATA interface seems to indicate that Seagate is going after the server market rather than the highend storage market [...]

I saw a recent IEEE Spectrum article on engineering’s grand challenges for the next century and thought something similar should be done for data storage. So this is a start:

Replace magnetic storage – most predictions show that magnetic disk storage has another 25 years and magnetic tape another decade after that before they run [...]

Both EMC and Spectra Logic celebrated their 30 years in business this month and it got me to thinking. Both companies started the same time but one is a ~$14B revenue (‘09 projected) behemoth and the other a relatively successful, but relatively mid-size storage company (Spectra Logic is private and does not report revenues). [...]

Was on an analyst call today where Bob Wambach of EMC was discussing their recent success with V-Max their newest version of their highly successful Symmetrix storage subsystem. But what was more interesting was their announcement of having sold 1PB of enterprise flash storage on Symmetrix and almost 2PB total across all EMC product [...]

SSD and/or SSS (solid state storage) performance is a mystery to most end-users. The technology is inherently asymmetrical, i.e., it reads much faster than it writes. I have written on some of these topics before (STEC’s new MLC drive, Toshiba’s MLC flash, Tape V Disk V SSD V RAM) but the issue is [...]

At the recent Flash Memory Summit there were a few announcements that show continued development of MRAM technology which can substitute for NAND or DRAM, has unlimited write cycles and is magnetism based. My interest in MRAM stems from its potential use as a substitute storage technology for today’s SSDs that use [...]