Intel Corporation and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies announced that they will jointly develop Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and Fibre Channel (FC) enterprise class solid-state drives (SSDs) for servers, workstations and storage systems. This is an exclusive agreement to develop and deliver SAS and FC enterprise SSDs with availability of the first products in early 2010.
This is a complementary partnership marrying Hitachi GST’s drive, channel and system knowledge together with Intel’s NAND flash and flash management expertise. Hitachi selected a strong NAND flash partner that doesn’t compete with it in its core HDD business. Now that two of the three enterprise HDD makers, Seagate and Hitachi, have publicly announced plans for enterprise SSDs, Fujitsu will be compelled to react, especially with its 23% enterprise HDD market share to protect.
Seagate may feel it is big enough to source the NAND flash and develop the SSDs on its own however, Fujitsu may need to develop a partnership with a NAND flash vendor. Two possible candidates: Micron and Hynix - NAND flash vendors with SSD ambitions but no competing HDD businesses. Micron has flash management expertise acquired through its own SSD development and leading cost structure based on 34nm technology. On the other hand, Hynix is lagging on both the SSD and NAND flash technology front.
If rumors of Western Digital acquiring Fujitsu's HDD business are correct, a company that has sat on the sidelines as companies have rushed into the SSD market will have to finally step up to the plate.
Showing posts with label HDD. Show all posts
Showing posts with label HDD. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Saturday, August 16, 2008
Seagate to Purchase SanDisk? Definitely, Maybe Not
Rumors are flying about Seagate buying SanDisk or Intel's stake in Intel-Micron Flash Technologies (http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=210004140). Does it make sense? Seagate does need access to low cost NAND flash to fuel its SSD ambitions. Here are some ways to think about it.
1. If Seagate were to purchase SanDisk or Intel's portion of IMFT, what are they going to do with all that capacity? SSDs are not going to be able to eat up all that capacity, at least not for the next couple of years. Does Seagate want to manufacture flash memory cards or supply to MP3 players? SanDisk's operating margin in 2007 was 8% and Seagate's 6.8% in FY08. However, if you strip out income from royalties and licensing, SanDisk's operating margins were -5%. Combining a primarily OEM HDD business with a low margin retail business could be challenging.
2. Seagate is primarily interested in enterprise SSDs which uses exclusively SLC NAND flash technology. Any SanDisk acquisition provides Segate with 150k 300mm wafers per month of MLC NAND technology. Spending $4 billion (market cap of SanDisk) to obtain MLC NAND flash technology for enterprise SSDs? (SanDisk and partner Toshiba currently do not manufacture any high density SLC NAND parts, although that could change in the near future.)
3. Seagate spends almost $1 billion in capex ($930m in FY08) p.a. in their HDD business. SanDisk in 2007 spent roughly $1.6 billion and Intel $1 billion in NAND flash. Looks like Seagate's capex would have to at least double if it wants to become a NAND flash manufacturer and it's balance sheet would be strained supporting such a high level of investment.
4. Intel is not ready to exit NAND flash, at least not in the near term. IMFT has typically been behind the technology leaders by 1-2 process generations. With the 34nm announcement, they are about to leap ahead. With the technology lead, IMFT will presumably have the lowest costs. In addition, Intel will be releasing a slew of competitive SSD offerings in the next months. If, with the lowest costs in the industry and a very strong product lineup, Intel still can't make money, then it will consider whether it makes sense to be in this business, but they're not going to quit before giving it their best shot.
Seagate needs access to low cost NAND flash and they don't need to obtain that access by getting into the retail flash card business or doubling their annual capex. They could achieve the same means by either investing a small equity stake in a NAND flash vendor or placing an upfront payment to secure NAND flash capacity at preferential pricing. Apple did something similar when it introduced its first flash-based iPOD. Such an arrangement also affords Seagate sourcing flexibility especially if those wild hockey stick projections of SSD shipments don't pan out.
1. If Seagate were to purchase SanDisk or Intel's portion of IMFT, what are they going to do with all that capacity? SSDs are not going to be able to eat up all that capacity, at least not for the next couple of years. Does Seagate want to manufacture flash memory cards or supply to MP3 players? SanDisk's operating margin in 2007 was 8% and Seagate's 6.8% in FY08. However, if you strip out income from royalties and licensing, SanDisk's operating margins were -5%. Combining a primarily OEM HDD business with a low margin retail business could be challenging.
2. Seagate is primarily interested in enterprise SSDs which uses exclusively SLC NAND flash technology. Any SanDisk acquisition provides Segate with 150k 300mm wafers per month of MLC NAND technology. Spending $4 billion (market cap of SanDisk) to obtain MLC NAND flash technology for enterprise SSDs? (SanDisk and partner Toshiba currently do not manufacture any high density SLC NAND parts, although that could change in the near future.)
3. Seagate spends almost $1 billion in capex ($930m in FY08) p.a. in their HDD business. SanDisk in 2007 spent roughly $1.6 billion and Intel $1 billion in NAND flash. Looks like Seagate's capex would have to at least double if it wants to become a NAND flash manufacturer and it's balance sheet would be strained supporting such a high level of investment.
4. Intel is not ready to exit NAND flash, at least not in the near term. IMFT has typically been behind the technology leaders by 1-2 process generations. With the 34nm announcement, they are about to leap ahead. With the technology lead, IMFT will presumably have the lowest costs. In addition, Intel will be releasing a slew of competitive SSD offerings in the next months. If, with the lowest costs in the industry and a very strong product lineup, Intel still can't make money, then it will consider whether it makes sense to be in this business, but they're not going to quit before giving it their best shot.
Seagate needs access to low cost NAND flash and they don't need to obtain that access by getting into the retail flash card business or doubling their annual capex. They could achieve the same means by either investing a small equity stake in a NAND flash vendor or placing an upfront payment to secure NAND flash capacity at preferential pricing. Apple did something similar when it introduced its first flash-based iPOD. Such an arrangement also affords Seagate sourcing flexibility especially if those wild hockey stick projections of SSD shipments don't pan out.
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Finally! A Simple Metric for Solid State Drive Endurance
We've all seen the impressive MTBF (mean time between failures) specifications of SSDs versus HDDs of one to two million hours versus 600 thousand hours in a notebook pc class application. However, unlike HDDs where a mechanical failure can make the entire HDD unusable, the main failure mechanism in a SSD relates to the memory cells becoming unusable. MTBF is a statistical calculation that unfortunately, does not capture the effect of write endurance.
The write endurance of a SSD is a function of the type of flash memory used (SLC, MLC), storage capacity, frequency of writes, data sizes of the writes and the amount of static data which relates to the wear leveling algorithm. System level endurance of SSDs in the industrial, enterprise and miliary space have ranged anywhere from one million to five million program/erase cycles. There are three main problems with this.
1. The endurance will depend on how the SSD is used in the application. As a result, SSD vendors can tweak the parameters for their own marketing purposes.
2. Not all SSD vendors use the same formula for calculating the endurance and the formulas can be overly complex.
3. A straight endurance metric is nebulous and difficult to grasp its implications, especially for OEMs who've never had to grapple with endurance issues in HDDs. For example: What's the effect on the lifetime of the drive?
SanDisk aims to solve this with the Longterm Data Endurance (LDE) metric. LDE is simply defined as the total amount of data writes allowed in the lifespan of the SSD. The metric is based on the Bapco write usage pattern for a typical business user and assumes the data is written equally over the lifetime of the drive and that data is retained for one year once the LDE specification is reached.
LDE allows OEMs a simple way to compare SSDs and determine, based on the applications usage patterns which drives are suitable for a particular application. For example, a drive with an 80TBW (teraByte write) LDE can support 20GB writes per day for 10 years (equivalent to 73TBW). For an application requiring support for only half the number of writes per day (10GB), a 40TBW rated drive would be sufficient.
The beauty of LDE is that it captures endurance in one single, understandable figure. A common metric is necessary to facilitate SSD adoption moving forward. Now comes the hard part: garnering support from other SSD vendors and OEMs.
I've uploaded a copy of Don Barnetson's presentation on LDE, "Solid State Drives: The MLC Challenge" on my website at http://www.forward-insights.com/.
The write endurance of a SSD is a function of the type of flash memory used (SLC, MLC), storage capacity, frequency of writes, data sizes of the writes and the amount of static data which relates to the wear leveling algorithm. System level endurance of SSDs in the industrial, enterprise and miliary space have ranged anywhere from one million to five million program/erase cycles. There are three main problems with this.
1. The endurance will depend on how the SSD is used in the application. As a result, SSD vendors can tweak the parameters for their own marketing purposes.
2. Not all SSD vendors use the same formula for calculating the endurance and the formulas can be overly complex.
3. A straight endurance metric is nebulous and difficult to grasp its implications, especially for OEMs who've never had to grapple with endurance issues in HDDs. For example: What's the effect on the lifetime of the drive?
SanDisk aims to solve this with the Longterm Data Endurance (LDE) metric. LDE is simply defined as the total amount of data writes allowed in the lifespan of the SSD. The metric is based on the Bapco write usage pattern for a typical business user and assumes the data is written equally over the lifetime of the drive and that data is retained for one year once the LDE specification is reached.
LDE allows OEMs a simple way to compare SSDs and determine, based on the applications usage patterns which drives are suitable for a particular application. For example, a drive with an 80TBW (teraByte write) LDE can support 20GB writes per day for 10 years (equivalent to 73TBW). For an application requiring support for only half the number of writes per day (10GB), a 40TBW rated drive would be sufficient.
The beauty of LDE is that it captures endurance in one single, understandable figure. A common metric is necessary to facilitate SSD adoption moving forward. Now comes the hard part: garnering support from other SSD vendors and OEMs.
I've uploaded a copy of Don Barnetson's presentation on LDE, "Solid State Drives: The MLC Challenge" on my website at http://www.forward-insights.com/.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
