Of course, our immediate goal is to get these in the hands of independent reviewers. You should see third-party tests coming out in the next month or so as we ramp to production and get drives sent out. Stay tuned–we’ll call out results both here and through our @RealSSD Twitter feed.

AS SSD Benchmark: 3G Empty

AS SSD Benchmark: 6G Empty

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We’re using the same Intel Core2Duo system, equipped with our 256GB RealSSD C300 drive and a 6 Gb/s SATA host bus adapter. We also test it at SATA 3 Gb/s to show how it will perform in those systems. I think you’re going to like the results.

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System Details
MoBo: Intel® X48 chipset based
Processor: Intel Core2Duo E8500
Memory: Micron® 2GB DDR3 1066 (PC3-8500)
OS: Windows® 7 Pro 64-b

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System Details
MoBo: Intel® X48 chipset based
Processor: Intel Core2Duo E8500
Memory: Micron® 2GB DDR3 1066 (PC3-8500)
Drive Interface: SATA 6Gb/s (via Marvel HBA)

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Multiple Routes to Quality & Reliability
More than any other segment, enterprise apps want high quality and high reliability NAND. While we create specially-designed “Enterprise NAND” that delivers super-low defect rates and high endurance for specific applications, there are other methods to increase endurance. For instance, some of our customers take advantage of the high density of our newest NAND to build systems with a surplus of capacity. Because there’s extra density, each cell is written less often, and the effective life of all the NAND goes up dramatically. Advanced wear-leveling algorithms will also provide advanced NAND with better endurance levels than it achieved in the past.

NAND Control Will See Breakthrough Innovation
Yes, developing NAND controller technology is more challenging with each process node, but it is also an area of heavy focus and technology investment. Micron, with SSD’s and other technologies in development, is ensuring that NAND is fit for the enterprise. Controllers will continue to improve along with the NAND changes—this is an area of tremendous innovation, and mirrors what occurred in HDD evolution.

Scaling—The Path Ahead
Some have suggested that only legacy process NAND is fit for enterprise applications. That’s simply not true. As noted above, there are multiple methods to achieve enterprise-class performance on advanced process NAND. And while we will continue to provide some legacy NAND for key applications, most enterprise customers will want to take advantage of the benefits new technology presents. In fact, this week we will introduce a new portfolio of ultra-reliable Enterprise NAND products designed on our mature 34nm NAND process – enabling the high density and better cost structure that only advanced process NAND can provide. Make sure to stay tuned to our blog for more on that later this week.

And we stated this summer at the Flash Memory Summit, NAND has plenty of room for further scaling improvements. Don’t let the naysayers fool you—the years ahead are going to be an exciting period of change and accelerating NAND adoption into hundreds of new applications. I’m looking forward to it.

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The point is, we need the storage capacity in our mobile devices to hold the huge amounts of data we consume. So what’s Micron doing to feed that capacity appetite? Today we announced new 16Gb and 32Gb NAND products built using our ground-breaking 34nm NAND process technology. These new NAND chips not only make it possible to store more on your smartphones, cell phones and MP3 players but also enable bigger and better memory cards, like Lexar’s new 16GB microSDHC card. Built with our super tiny 16Gb die, Lexar’s 16GB microSDHC card, can store up to 48,000 2-megapixel JPEG photos, 4,000 songs, or 80 hours of standard-def video—allowing you to super size your portable device’s capacity and enjoy more of the stuff you love.

And for the photography buffs out there, Micron’s new 32Gb NAND chip has made it possible for Lexar to create a new 32GB Lexar Platinum II SDHC memory card. That’s enough capacity for 12 hours of HD video or over 20,000 5-megapixel images! And since we’ve added a high-speed NAND interface to all of our new high-capacity NAND products, these new cards are seriously fast; speed-rated at 60x. This gives our photo enthusiasts the ability to take full advantage of their camera’s burst-mode setting to capture many images in rapid fire succession.

So whether it’s photos, video, music, or games you’re after, Micron’s new NAND products give your portable devices the additional capacity they need to store all your favorites—so you can watch and rock out to more media than ever before, all from the palm of your hand.

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First up–who the heck is SNIA?  Usual blogger shortcut here–a quote from their website:

“SNIA [advances] IT technologies, standards, and education programs for all IT professionals. Made up of some 400 member companies spanning the global storage market, the SNIA connects the IT industry with end-to-end storage and information management solutions.

As a not-for-profit association, the SNIA enables our members to develop robust solutions for storing and managing the massive volumes of information generated by today’s businesses. … As a result, the SNIA has adopted the role of industry catalyst for the development of storage solution specifications and technologies, global standards, and storage education.”

What I’m really looking forward to the most (in no particular order) is:

•    Meeting with others in the industry in an informal, free-exchange atmosphere
•    Working to bring some coherence to the messaging and marketing around solid state hard drives
•    Peeking under the covers at the other SNIA technical working groups (Cloud and Green storage are a couple of the big topics for example)
•    Helping to define and develop concise standards around SSD performance measurement

Why are we interested in events like this?  Simple: establishing standards results in industry progress– it enables customers and manufacturers to better engage and innovate around a technological concept, prototype, or even a finished product.  Because the fact is, measuring performance can be done through many different lenses–for example, a certain perspective can make a given device look better (to drive sales) or make another solution look worse (FUD to hamper adoption by competing technology).  So having the industry get together and agree on standards helps shore up the rules of engagement; like how one benchmarks and tests a device, what state the device is in when the tests are run, and so on.  They help ease some of the obfuscation one often encounters when comparing devices from different manufacturers, or in different usage models.

Of course the SNIA isn’t the only standards group working on this for SSDs.  We are also deeply involved with these efforts at JEDEC as well.  We see these kinds of focused dialogues as win-win.

Anyway, I’ll be in Chicago talking, listening, taking notes—don’t wait up. I’ll post a follow up once I’m back.

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If you used you car as a vanpool, and if you were loaded to the gills already, probably not.  But what if I also told you that this rule applied to their larger vehicles too—you could get a massive 18-passenger maxi-van with double the typical gas mileage if you  were willing to order one with 13 seats instead.  Suppose I also told you that this trick worked on every car they made.

What about now?  Would you do it? For those of you that think I’ve lost it there is a computer analogy coming (you knew there would be, right?). Suppose I told you that you could  as much as double the performance of your solid state drive (SSD) if you gave up 25% of the capacity.  Would you do it?  Suppose I also told you that the drive will last longer as a bonus.  How about now?

You can do all this. How? Overprovisioning.

First, a little background on overprovisioning—the basic principle here is to put more NAND on the drive that the drive actually reports.  Why on earth would one do that?  Performance.

Suppose we have a drive that actually is built with 64GB of NAND.  Suppose we “fix” the drive such that it knows to tell the operating system (Windows, Linux, doesn’t matter) that it is “really” a 50GB drive and that the drive owns the extra 14GB of NAND.  So physically we have 64GB on the drive, but logically the drive only shows it has 50GB.  Where did the other 14GB go?  Who stole my NAND?

Well, nobody–the NAND is still there.  That extra 14GB is reserved for the drive; it is there only for the drive’s private use.  This is the principle of overprovisioning. What does the drive use the extra space for?  Several background bookkeeping functions that are hidden from the user, but that are essential to a solid state drive’s performance over the life of the drive.

In a nutshell, NAND-based SSDs like to group data together–it’s a feature of NAND’s personality, the chips like to have data grouped.  They also like to leave little pieces of data scattered about the drive.  A contradiction?  Yes, NAND is like that.  The contradiction comes from the physical way NAND is erased and programmed.  The short version: when NAND is erased, it has to be erased in large segments.  But applications and operating systems like to write data in small blocks.  So even though the NAND prefers the data in large chunks, applications and operating systems aren’t always so obliging.  Therefore we get scattered bits of data on the drive.

But, NAND drives are smart. They know that they like their data well organized and rely on the NAND controller to group these little scattered bits and place them all nice and neat together.  We use a somewhat unflattering term for this process: garbage collection.

Another important feature of NAND-based SSDs is “wear leveling” – which ensures that all the NAND cells on the drive work together to share the storage load (wouldn’t it be nice if people worked that way?).  In order to ensure all the cells share the work, the NAND controller often has to move data around–moving data from cells that are heavily used to less-used cells to make sure all cells are worn evenly.  Hence the fancy name.

In order for garbage collection and wear leveling to work, they both need free space on the drive.  This free space is a temporary spot to put data during the garbage collection and wear-leveling processes.  The data sits there for a bit until it finds a more permanent home.

On an empty drive, free space is abundant, but what about a full drive?  What happens to free space–the working space the garbage collection and wear leveling processes use–as the drive fills?  It goes away.  Without free space, these processes struggle to keep up with demand. What’s a drive to do?  It needs to collect the garbage (by the way, I don’t like that term, but it is well adopted) and do its wear-leveling thing.
Enter overprovisioning.  By reserving a bit of NAND (typically 25% in an enterprise drive and 7% in a client drive) for these background processes–effectively hiding that “extra” space for the OS–the NAND controller is ensured that it has enough empty space to do its thing and not get in the way of the normal data storage processes.

Cool, isn’t it?  But what’s the real gain?  I mean, you’re essentially giving up 25% of the drive to this reserved space–so what do you really get?

First let me throw out a caveat: YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary). Because the actual improvement is heavily dependent on workload, the OS, how full the drive really is, and a number of other factors.  However–in the lab I’ve seen performance improvements up to 4X,  and–the drive lasts longer too. For us, overprovisioning was a no-brainer. With the rapid and regular increases in NAND density, giving up a small slice of capacity for better performance, higher reliability, and longer life was an easy call. I’ll discuss all the details more in a later post.

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• A History of Digital Storage
  1. Tape Drives
  2. Magnetic Drum Memory
  3. The Birth of the Hard Drive
  4. The 5.25-inch Hard Drive
  5. Limitations of the HDD
  6. The RAM SSD & NAND
  7. NAND in SSDs

NAND technology paved the way for a new breed of SSD that is able to emulate HDDs in most enterprise or consumer applications. These SSDs are far less expensive than DRAM-based SSDs and still offer several advantages over HDDs—particularly in terms of performance and reliability.

Because NAND-based SSDs are a solid state technology, they have no moving parts and offer much better performance than HDDs. When a command is issued to an HDD, the drive must seek with its actuator, spin its platter, and then transfer the data back to the host. But SSDs have no moving parts (requiring only the time it takes to process the command), and they have random access times as quick as 20µs [52].

HDD External Storage I/O Timing

The improved performance of new SSDs equates to 10,000 IOPS compared to less than 450 IOPS for the fastest HDDs [53]. When used in enterprise applications like Internet banking, SSDs might significantly boost information access.

With no moving parts to wear out or break, an SSD will

SSD External Storage I/O Timing

outlast almost any HDD, which typically has only a three- to five-year life expectancy if it is not bumped, banged, or dropped. By comparison, a modern SSD might last twice that long and do so without the sensitivities to mechanical shock and while consuming only a fraction of the power.

RAIDs, Connections, and the Next Step for SSDs

SSDs can go anywhere an HDD can, so for enterprise and consumer applications alike, SSDs are replacing HDDs—a trend that is sure to continue for the next decade or more. But using an SSD as a drop-in replacement for an HDD is not necessarily using SSDs to their fullest potential. RAID controllers, HDD interfaces, and storage subsystems have been optimized for the characteristics of rotating magnetic media and may be a bottleneck for solid state storage.

Due to the flexibility of NAND solid state storage, SSDs will once again change the picture of storage in computers. NAND-based storage will become more integrated into the computer and will enable new generations of applications. Productivity gains will be measurable and the power savings, dramatic.

Conclusion

Digital storage has come a long way since 1956, with the most recent innovation being SSDs. And now that SSDs are gaining new ground with the advancements made possible by NAND Flash technology, they represent the next evolutionary step for storage applications.

Notes:

[52] Wong, page 15.
[53] Justin Sykes, “SSDs to Boost Data Center Performance,” Micron Technology, Inc. Boise, Idaho, (July 30, 2008): page 3.

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