Embedded Solid State Storage
The following is an introduction to the SSD industry. Our attempt is to offer the user a few references to understand the SSD offerings found today.
SSD modules are quickly becoming the talk of the town. This is a quick, moving market, where leadership is a very completive position. Performance, density and pricing is a daily moving target. We have been in the memory market for 25 years, and today's flash activity is as exciting as ever.
Storage Search is one of the best followers of flash based memory systems. Here you will find unbiased views of the non-volatile memory market. DV Nation is in the business of selling SSDs, but seems to have a finger on the latest memory offerings.
The Compact Flash module is by far the best of all worlds when it comes to size, density, performance and price. When compared to more sophisticated SSD devices, Compact Flash compensates for the lack in performance to price advantage. Many CF modules do not offer ECC or Wear Leveling algorithms which are important to flashed based disk systems. We have performed extensive research and have found that companies like Super-Talent of San Jose provides OEM CF modules that meet these challenges, offering Wear Leveling in all of their flashed based products. Besides their wide offering of memory based products, the company actively supports the SSD movement by providing OEM integration of flash technology.
SSD modules take on form factors that range from standard 1.8, 2.5 and 3.5 inch disk drive footprints. Flash control is where the performance war takes place. Each manufacture has the same flash chip available to them. It is all in how well they manage reads and writes to the memory. We see a wide range of learning curve with performance offerings. The winners here will be those with the best ASIC designers.
SSD based adapters are available with many and most bus interfaces. Adapters use anywhere from CF modules, to SSD drives to even proprietary flash integration.
Addonics offers a 32 bit PCI adapter with 4 CF modules, using a 2X striping. At $50, this is a great bargain. The board comes unpopulated, leaving the user the ability to purchase their own CF modules, so choose carefully.
Technobox has been a leader in PMC based products as long as I can remember. They offer simple straight to the point solutions. We have a couple of their boards ourselves. Their CF based products offer quick to market solutions.
Bitmicro is ranked as a leader in the SSD market. Product offerings include SSD disk modules along with bus based adapters.
Texas Memory Systems in my opinion provides an impressive engineered SSD line. Their Ramsan line offers large arrays of mixed memory based disk systems. Their systems offer enterprise based server installations the best of SSD memory.