If you could go back in time and take with you a load of memory chips and SSDs from today (along with compatible adapters so they could plug and play) how would that change the world?



What if you could bring back SSDs from the future? what's the value of infinitely faster RAM?

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SSD timeline - very short version



1999 - SSD market exceeds 10 active oems for the first time



2000 - world's first online ads for enterprise SSDs



2001 - 3.5" SCSI flash SSDs have 14GB capacity



2002 - 1st NAS flash SSD



2003 - terabyte SSD systems become commercially available



2004 - StorageSearch.com asks - what do SSD buyers want?



2005 - Samsung declares SSDs to be a strategic market



........... first shipments of SAS SSD storage (server based SDS)



2006 - SSD awareness flares into notebooks



2007 - PCIe SSD shipments begin in enterprise



........... first designs of 3.5" SAS SSDs unveiled



........... enterprise flash IOPS can replace entry level RAM SSDs



2008 - SSD market reaches 100 active SSD companies



2009 - SSDs match hard drives in capacity at 2.5" terabyte level



2010 - SSD revenue reaches billions of dollars



........... first fizz of the SSD market bubble



2011 - SSD software becomes useful



........... market excitement from Fusion-io's IPO



2012 - EOL for RAM SSD market (SSD is flash),



........... adaptive R/W DSP flash vendors passes 10 companies



2013 - integrated rack level SSD technology beats the sum of the parts



........... SSD software promises to become gateway for all data



........... DRAM DIMMs is new form factor for fast flash SSDs



........... SSD ecosystem - negates need to invent everything by new startups



2014 - in-situ SSD processing



........... PCIe SSD market re-energized with 2.5" and M.2



........... random access memory doesn't have to be RAM



........... 3D nand flash -may be tough enough for industrial markets



2015 - retiring and retiering DRAM was one of the big new SSD ideas





2016 - NVMe over Fabric, memory systems customization, etc



2017 - Shortages in legacy memory made "emerging nvms" look better



2018 - First QLC SSDs ship. MRAM retention got 1,000x better.

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world's first SSDs for use in Intel PCs In 1982 - SemiDisk Systems (based in Beaverton Oregon) became the first company to ship SSD accelerators for the Intel microprocessor based PC market.



SemiDisk's first disk emulator cards were S-100 form factor RAM SSDs with 512 kilobytes capacity ($1,995 price at launch). Internally they used 64Kb DRAM, worked via a proprietary interface - and were designed to work with S-100 computers (which had Z80 8 bit CPUs inside with a 64 kilobytes addressible bus). Soon after, SemiDisk built similar cards for TRS-80 Model II computers, and IBM PC's, and Epson QX-10 computers, and increased the capacity to 2 megabytes when 256Kb DRAM became available.



SemiDisk's founder - Jim Bell - told me (in 2014) "the R/W throughput of these SSDs was limited by the Z-80 block transfer function speed. (INIR, OTIR) So it was about 500 kilobytes/second speed. But that was considered VERY fast in the early 1980's... Speed was always the main benefit (and reason for buying)... It was mostly consumers and businesses who bought it."



Jim also said "One notable feature of these cards is that they 'carpeted' the card with memory sockets that were literally as close together as it was possible to push them! They used 'dipguard' type decoupling capacitors, too."



Jim said he designed the prototype of the SemiDisk in "about October 1980" - when he was working for Intel in Aloha Oregon. He went on to say - "I built a device on a wirewrap, prototype card, using 2118 5-volt 16kbit DRAMs. It had 32 sockets, and I installed the chips 8-high. (Looked like a brick!; heavy, too, because the chips were ceramic, specifically 'cerdip' devices.)"



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the SSD story - market survival of the fittest? The emerging size of the flash SSD market as you see it today was by no means inevitable. It owes a lot to 3 competing storage media competitors which failed to evolve fast enough in the Darwinian jungle of the storage market in the past decade.



One of these 3 contenders is definitely on the road to extinction - but could one of the other 2 still emerge to threaten flash SSDs?



The article - SSD's past phantom demons explores the latent market threats which hovered around the flash SSD market in the past decade. They seemed real and solid enough at the time. Getting a realistic perspective of flash SSD's past demons (which seemed very threatening at the time) may help you better judge the so-called "new" generation of nv memory contenders - which are also discussed in the article. ...read the article



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TMS's founder writes about 20 years of DoD SSDs Editor:- September 20, 2010 - Holly Frost founder of Texas Memory Systems has written a paper (pdf) which describes how variants of the company's newer SSDs like the RamSan-630 have been used recently by the US DoD and Intelligence Community.



In another article he describes some features of their 1st DoD SSD in 1988. The company launched its 1st commercial enterprise SSDs in 2001 - but has continued evolving its defense based array processing capabilities.



Later:- in December 2011 - I talked to Holly Frost - who says the SSD market is the most exciting place to be working - about a wide range of subjects related to SSD design and the SSD market.



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The History of Solid State Memory Storage (pdf) This is a guide written by ViON and accurately sums up one of the problems which faced SSD accelerator makers from the late 1980s to mid 1990s period until FC SANs got established.



Here's an extract...



"Over time many other vendors have entered, and left the business of providing solid state storage systems. Solid state developed a reputation of being really great, if you could afford it. This was due to an inherent flaw in the basic design theory. In short, the flaw arises from the fact that while the storage mechanism of a solid state device is fast, the interfaces required to connect to a host system were not fast enough to take advantage of the performance potential.



"During this timeframe (and continuing to the present time) most solid state systems employ slow SCSI connections. During the 1980s, 1990s and into the 2000s, SCSI was a slow interface and could sustain data transfer rates of only 40 to 80 MB per second. At these speeds, host computers could not really realize the benefits necessary to capitalize on the very high initial investment solid state storage is expensive!"



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when did it become clear that SSDs would be a huge market? Editor:- SSDs have been listed in the buyers guides I've published since 1992. And in 1998 - I published the world's 1st continuously updated directory of SSD oems (the url of which is now our main SSD news page).



By talking to people in the SSD market and in processor chip companies (as part of my SPARC market acceleration work) in the late 1990s and early 2000s I guessed that SSDs had the potential to become an economic mainstream solution (instead of an expensive niche) to counter the flattening of the peak performance growth curve in enterprise CPUs.



But how big would that SSD market be?



When I started talking to enterprise SSD companies about my market models in 2003 (at that time "enterprise SSD" was synonymous with "RAM SSD") they were initially skeptical. Each SSD company was only seeing a small part of the market. But my SSD pages were acting as a focus point for all vendors and most users in the industry. It was easy for me to get an overview picture which no one else was in a position to see.



I talked to many SSD company founders at that time - explaining my ideas, learning more about what their technologies could do. And they told me about customer success stories which their customers didn't want to publicize - because it would give their customers' competitors too many insights into how they had solved strategic business problems using SSDs.



As a consensus view started to emerge from these many 1 on 1s - some SSD companies (including some in their early years of stealth mode) adapted their business plans around the concept of a greatly expanded SSD market future.



A few years later - in 2005 - I published a new version of my SSD market penetration model which looked at all the possible market segments for SSDs instead of just the enterprise. That model was precipitated by the steep dive in flash memory pricing which meant that flash SSDs would soon be 100x cheaper than just a few years before.



Marketers in flash SSD companies liked the new model even better. And were happy to tell me privately how useful it was. They even started to quote from it - although by the time the text had made it into their sales collaterals and web sites the original attribution was mostly lost.



Where are we now?



2016 - there's more to upcoming change in SSD than DIMM wars



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flash storage in notebooks predated SSDs I originally stated that - in January 2006 - NextCom became the first notebook maker to qualify flash SSDs*.



I later added the note "for use in Windows XP, Linux and Solaris notebooks."



Thanks to Robin Harris, editor StorageMojo.com for this email note (April 19, 2006).



"The original HP Omnibook 300 offered a PCMCIA flash disk as a several hundred dollar option ($400?) back in (I think) 1993.



"I know because I bought it and used one for years. The option had 10MB of capacity and HP packaged in a compression utility that automatically compressed everything on the flash card, so the effective capacity was 20MB.



"The real benefit wasn't weight, as the 300 weighed in at 2.9lbs with or without a hard disk. The win was battery life - which went to 10 hours with the SSD from about 3-4 hours with the HDD.



"With an instant-on feature that really worked, and a decent PDA and terminal emulation, built in Word & Excel (to which I added Powerpoint) I had a very solid, unfussy machine that I only had to charge every few days. Lived with it daily for 5 years until I had to give it up because it would no longer do what I needed."



Editor:- strictly speaking the Omnibook drive wasn't an SSD, because it didn't include wear-leveling. But it was an early example of flash replacing hard disk storage in a notebook style product.



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Let me introduce a new concept in computer architecture - SSD CPU Equivalence.



The SSD accelerator market should be viewed as a replacement for part of the server CPU market.



Not as a percentage of storage spend. could SSDs become a $10 Billion Market? (2003)







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sugaring MLC for the enterprise When flash SSDs started to be used as enterprise server accelerators in 2004 - competing RAM SSD makers said flash wasn't reliable enough.



RAM SSDs had been used for server speedups since 1976 - and in 2004 they owned the enterprise market. (Before 2004 - flash SSDs weren't fast enough and had mostly been used as rugged storage in the military and industrial markets - and in space constrained civilian products such as smartphones.)



By 2007 it was clear that the endurance of SLC flash was more than good enough to survive in high IOPS server caches. And in the ensuing years the debate about enterprise flash SSDs shifted to MLC - because when systems integrators put early cheap consumer grade SSDs into arrays - guess what happened? They burned out within a few months - exactly as predicted.



Since 2009 new controller technologies and the combined market experience of enterprise MLC pioneers like Fusion-io and SandForce have demonstrated that with the right management - MLC can survive in most (but still not all) fast SSDs.



Now as we head into 1X nanometer flash generations new technical challenges are arising and MLC SSD makers disagree about which is the best way to implement enterprise MLC SSDs.



Which type of so called "enterprise MLC" is best? Can you believe the contradictory marketing claims? Can you even understand the arguments? (Probably not.)



And that's why marketing is going to play a bigger part in the next round of enterprise SSD wars as SSD companies wave their wands and reveal more about the magic inside their SSD engines to audiences who don't really understand half of what they're being told. Unlike the Cola Wars - you can't take the risk of a bad enterprise MLC SSD taste test. ...read the article







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"It's clear now why it take so long

for the software industry to

wake up to the idea of SSDs." where are we now with SSD software?





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From 2007 it started to become clear that controller architecture could play a bigger part in the SSD pricing equation than memory - and by 2011 the activity in the market (measured by product success) showed clearly that SSD-aware software too had the potential to differentiate SSD products in business ways which de-emphasized the role which memory played in characterizing SSDs (in nearly all markets). an SSD view of past, present and future boom bust cycles in the memory market





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Reliability is more than just MTBF... and unlike Quality - it's not free. I had flagged Storage Reliability as a long term strategic concern for the market in a trends article (2005) - in which I said that the risks posed by uncorrectable data failures due to systemic design flaws in storage drives "could be more serious than the Y2K bug threat - if not dealt with in advance."



Most people didn't understand what I was talking about.



They (wrongly) assumed that they could always depend on oems to design a workable level of reliability into their storage products. And if that wasn't good enough - then a wraparound layer of RAID supported by some type of data backup would work well enough for their needs.



In 2010 - as we got sucked into the SSD market bubble we began to see more customer concerns about the poor reputation which some leading storage oems were acquiring - due to shipping undependable and incompletely verified SSD designs. storage reliability (2006 to 2012)





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Was there ever a Golden Heroic Age of the Enterprise SSD market?



and could the plot of the enterprise SSD story have been rewritten with different characters to make it simpler?



musings from an SSD mouse





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From 2008 onwards as the growing visibility of the expanding SSD universe moved into the start of the first years of the enterprise SSD market bubble - the market moved into a new phase of multiple interpretations, explanations and misinformation about the economic cost benefits of enterprise flash.



Many SSD vendors themselves were clueless about the real economic benefits of their products - because they didn't know enough about the user application experience - and the diversity of user businesses and risk profiles for projects. Exiting the Astrological Age of Enterprise SSD Pricing





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the impact of file metadata on applications performance Editor:- October 5, 2016 - The interdependency of storage software, physical storage and applications performance is one of the constantly recurring themes in the SSD era.



When you change one variable - such as the assumption that storage has a single type of characteristic - the old west 6 shooter rotational model which underpinned all data IO requests in legacy systems software - to a faster machine gun model - with futuristic options verging towards the light saber and photonic data shots - thanks to solid state storage - then data systems architects have more degrees of freedom around which they can optimise system effectiveness.



A recent blog from Primary Data - Accelerate Applications by Offloading File Metadata Operations - gives a top level view of why it can be useful to offload file metadata operations from storage arrays. Among other things the blog reminds us that...



"Storage array CPUs can spend significant processing cycles keeping up with all the metadata operations such as managing file permissions and tracking open and close events that might otherwise be used for processing data I/O. In some cases, this can bring both storage and client application performance to a crawl." ...read the blog





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a winter's tale of SSD market influences - from industrial flash controllers to HPC flash arrays - set against the tapestry of a single company which divided to face the tempests of change Editor:- November 15, 2016 - Recently I spoke to AccelStor's President - Charles Tsai.



We talked about many changing influences in the SSD market. I thought you might be interested to see some of the things we spoke about in a new blog on StorageSearch.com - a winter's tale of SSD market influences - because it will give you an idea of how many strategic changes in the SSD market can now influence every business decision about what new products to create - even when those changing factors seem at first to be only loosely connected like the flash controller, industrial SSD, SCM, software and enterprise rackmount SSD markets.



All those factors entwined the flow of this SSD conversation which really started 2 years before. ...read the article





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"At the technology level, the systems we are building through continued evolution are not advancing fast enough to keep up with new workloads and use cases. The reality is that the machines we have today were architected 5 years ago, and ML/DL/AI uses in business are just coming to light, so the industry missed a need." From the blog - Envisioning Memory Centric Architecture by Robert Hormuth, VP/Fellow and Server CTO - Dell EMC (January 26, 2017)





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... before and after



4 ways to split SSD history into "before and after" to understand now



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