SSD Prices On Parity With High-End HDD By 2011

kgagne writes "EMC executives were heavily pitching the virtues of solid state disk drives at their annual users conference in Las Vegas, saying that SSD will not only be on price parity with high-end Fibre Channel disk drives by the end of 2010 or early 2011, but that NAND memory will solve all sorts of read/write issues created by spinning disk technology. EMC's CEO and its storage platforms chief said the company will do everything it can to drive SSD prices down, and adoption up, by deploying them in their products. One issue might be that EMC is using SSD from STEC, which is being sued by Seagate for patent infringement." The article also mentions some of the work EMC has been doing to make sure SSD is enterprise-class reliable, such as developing "wear leveling" software.

Comments

Re:What about filesystems...

[kesuki]

When NAND memory fails, it can fail in such a way as to make the ENTIRE flash memory device unreadable... this is from real world NAND memory devices failing from real world use, all of a sudden not wear leveling seems like a suicidal mode of wear... if the entire chip can short out from a single block failing. There's 0 reason for a properly designed flash device to fail like that due to wear, leveling or not. That's just shitty engineering. "Tunnel injection is the quantum tunneling effect, also called Fowler-Nordheim tunnel injection, when charge carriers are injected to an electric conductor through a thin layer of an electric insulator."

you should have said 'IANAEE' for i am not an electrical engineer. because the way NAND ram works it is entirely possible for failure to be a complete and total failure of the device, or at least 512 blocks of the device, if it doesn't create a short that prevents the whole device from working.

first today's flash memory is NAND memory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory

NAND memory is written with tunnel injection, which causes charge carriers to be injected into a conductor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_injection

Charge carriers "In semiconductor physics, the traveling vacancies in the valence-band electron population (holes) are treated as charge carriers"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charge_carrier

So we're using an electric charge, to fill, and create 'electron holes' in a conductor. what could POSSIBLY go wrong, in the real world, rapidly changing if a conductor has electron holes or not, by forcing the electrons in or out of the material ...

so trying to intentionally wear out a NAND memory chip can cause a severe problem whereby instead of creating an electron hole, you've created a short circuit. "A short circuit (sometimes abbreviated to short or s/c) allows a current to flow along a different path from the one intended." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_circuit