By Joel Hruska /arstechnica.com
March 14, 2008
SSD products and deployments
have been a hot topic of late,
but consumer SSD options are
still confined to the extreme
high end of the market. Faster
drives and a falling
cost-per-gigabyte should help
bring drive costs down from the
stratosphere and into a price
bracket more consumers can
afford, but the focus in the
manufacturing world right now is
on boosting storage capacities
and performance, not reducing
costs. It's very much a game
right now where every 12 months,
we're going to see considerable
breakthroughs in performance.
Yesterday, memory
manufacturer OCZ announced a
SATA-II drive that will offer
read/write speeds of 120MB and
100MB. That's a substantial
improvement over
first-generation SSDs, which
typically offer read/write
speeds in the 60MBps/35MBps
range. At first, the drives will
be available in 32GB or 64GB
capacities.
The graph below compares
drive speed between current SSD
models and the highest-end
laptop drive available.
Performance numbers for the SSD
drives are
manufacturer-reported, while the
Hitachi 7K200's performance is
drawn from Storage Review's
review of that unit. The
discrepancy isn't ideal, but
Hitachi doesn't report drive
performance in the same way as
most manufacturers.
Hitachi's Travelstar 7K200
actually compares quite well
against Samsung's
first-generation SSD, but
second-generation, SATA-II
drives will outstrip anything a
traditional spindle-based hard
drive can offer.
OCZ's listed MSRP of $499 for
the 32GB drive and $1,099 for
the 64GB drive won't smash any
price barriers, but it will put
pressure on the market and
thereby lower the cost of lesser
drives. As drive capacities
continue to grow and interface
speeds increase, the
high-capacity, high-end models
of today will become the budget
models of next year, too. OCZ
isn't the only player making
waves right now with SSD-related
announcements.
As we recently discussed,
Intel has big plans for the SSD
market in 2008 that could
rapidly turn today's top-end
drive into tomorrow's midrange
model. According to Intel CEO
Paul Otellini, the company will
launch 80GB and 160GB SSDs later
this year. These new drives will
utilize the Open NAND Flash
Interface 2.0 and should be
capable of a sustained
200MB/100MB read/write speed.
This type of rapid-pace
development isn't bad for OCZ
and other players—it'll actually
allow them to sell more drives
at a variety of price points.
Consumers, meanwhile, will
benefit as well, particularly if
the rapid pace of development
pushes first-gen drives into the
"genuinely affordable" market.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
2. High-Speed Flash Using Open NAND
Flash Interface (ONFI) 2.0 give SSD
Giant Speed Boost.
By Jon Stokes /arstechnica.com
February 01, 2008
The high-speed NAND flash
specification that Intel
previewed at IDF last year is
officially upon us. IM Flash
Technologies, the joint memory
venture that Intel and Micron
started back in 2005, has
announced a new line of NAND
flash storage chips that boast a
five-fold increase in read and
write speeds versus conventional
flash memory. NAND chips based
on the Open NAND Flash Interface
(ONFI) 2.0 can achieve 200MB/s
of sustained read throughput and
100MB/s of write throughput,
making them better equipped to
keep up with the boom in solid
state disks and with the coming
USB 3.0 spec.
(In case you're comparing the
aforementioned read and write
numbers to USB3's promised 4.8
GB/s bandwidth and wondering
what gives, the answer is that
multiple chips can be ganged
together to provide a greater
aggregate read bandwidth, just
like is done with DRAM. The same
is true for SSD.)
The new interface NAND spec
increases the performance of
flash memory by taking a page
from the DRAM playbook and
moving to a double data rate
(DDR) interface. The new DDR
signaling combines with an
increase in bus clockspeed and a
few other innovations to bring
about the major throughput
boost. Access latency isn't
really improved by the new spec,
but latencies for flash are
already so much lower than those
for magnetic storage (hence the
use of flash caches in hard
drives) that this isn't an
issue.
Hello, EeePC and MacBook Air
The portable media player and
digital A/V equipment
applications for high-speed NAND
are enticing, but the new chips
will really have a dramatic
impact in the solid state disks
that power mobile computers like
the Asus EeePC and MacBook Air.
Hard drive transfer rates are in
the 50 MB/s to 75 MB/s average
throughput range, with burst
transfer numbers going north of
200MB/s. Compare that to a
single high-speed NAND flash
part, which can do sustained
200MB/s transfers with access
times about 10x faster than a
hard drive and you've got a
heckuva hard disk. All that, and
low power, superior thermals and
instant-on to boot.
All told, IM Flash
claims to expect a 2x or 4x
boost in SSD performance over
those based on conventional
NAND. With at least one
recent 2.5" SATA SSD based
on conventional NAND already
hitting 170 MB/s burst speeds
(up to 300 MB/s when two cards
are ganged together), even a 2x
speedup will going to make for
pretty stellar performance for
those who can afford a
high-speed NAND SSD.
IM Flash is only
sampling the new chips right
now; full-scale production will
start in the second half of
2008. With Apple as one of the
flash maker's major customers,
we can expect the high-speed
NAND to make its way into Apple
media and mobile devices
eventually. But don't look for a
high-speed NAND SSD option from
Apple immediately after the
chips become available, since it
will take some time for the
devices drop in price enough to
make them worth considering for
even a high-end consumer
product.
