The Importance of Selecting a Strong SSD Manufacturer
Micron is an integrated SSD manufacturer, producing solid state storage products from the device down to the silicon NAND itself. A leader in the solid state storage industry, they were first to release a line of 25nm NAND flash storage products earlier this year. One of the discussions we’ve had with them over the past several months is how a company goes about comparing SSD devices, given the lack of standards in the industry and the amount of information that’s available. At SNW, Micron participated in a panel which Storage Switzerland sponsored around this topic. This panel was not recorded but the material from this discussion can be heard in a webinar Storage Switzerland did recently, which is available for viewing online here.
In addition to comparing products themselves, the evaluation process also gives the user information about the vendor. In the SSD space, the choice of manufacturer may be more significant than with other storage products. One recurring topic of discussion at this SNW was about how SSD manufacturing differed from traditional disk storage, essentially how it’s not getting any easier to produce enterprise-grade flash storage products.
Thursday, April 7, 2011
Recording media is inherently imperfect, so we’ve used error correction technologies to overcome those imperfections. As a storage technology progresses its density increases. Making electronics smaller is the primary strategy for most improvements, including expanding capacity. In the SSD space this means wafers are getting thinner and the lithography continues to shrink, putting more traces on each square mm of silicon. But this causes bit errors at the substrate level to also increase, meaning more must be done by the device to compensate. There’s a lot going on under the covers to make sure that SSDs have the reliability and longevity you expect - which they do. This is nothing new to the electronics industry and users certainly don’t need to understand the myriad processes that SSD designers and NAND fabricators employ. But it does underscore the amount of technology that’s involved and shows the importance of selecting a strong SSD manufacturer.
Eric Slack, Senior Analyst
SNW Briefing Note
It is April and that means that Storage Switzerland is once again at Storage Networking World (SNW). This spring we find SNW in Santa Clara, California, the home of much of the storage industry. As a result this year we have a record setting number of briefing meetings as well as a speaking session on solid state storage specmenship.
Micron is a client of Storage Switzerland
