SanDisk SSD Solid State Drives

Ushering in A New Era in Mobile Computing
SanDisk offers a line of products that is shifting a growing range of markets from the hard disk drive to flash-based storage, including: mobile computing, low-cost PCs and blade servers. SanDisk SSD product families deliver far superior durability and higher performance, particularly for OS boot and application load. As the cost of flash declines dramatically, users can now benefit both from an enhanced overall experience and from a reduced total cost of ownership (TCO). Backed by a vast NAND flash IP portfolio and operational excellence, SanDisk enables OEMs, ODMs, integrators and users to take advantage of a superb product offering.

SanDisk SSD UATA 5000 1.8"
SanDisk SSD UATA 5000 1.8”, with up to 64-gigabyte (GB)* flash memory, is targeted at enterprise users as the first step in mass consumer adoption of the solid state drive in the mobile PC market.
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SanDisk SSD SATA 5000 2.5"
SanDisk SSD SATA 5000 2.5", a solid state drive with up to 64-gigabyte (GB)* flash memory, is a drop-in replacement for the hard disk drive. This popular form factor and Serial ATA (SATA) interface are ideal for thin and light notebooks, the largest mobile PC segment in the enterprise space.
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uSSD™ 5000 Solid State Drive
SanDisk has expanded its flash-based solid state drive (SSD) product offering to cost-effectively meet low-capacity storage requirements.
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SSD (formerly FFD) SATA 2.5”
The SanDisk SSD SATA 2.5" (formerly FFD 2.5" Serial ATA) is a state-of-the-art solid-state flash disk, based on NAND flash technology, that provides the functionality of a hard disk with no moving parts.
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SSD (formerly FFD) UATA 2.5”
The SanDisk SSD UATA 2.5" (formerly FFD 2.5" Ultra ATA) is a state-of-the-art solid-state flash disk, based on NAND flash technology, that provides the functionality of a hard disk with no moving parts.
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SSD Ultra320 Wide SCSI 3.5”
The SSD Ultra320 Wide SCSI is fully compatible with the SCSI-2 and SCSI-3 interfaces and therefore with existing systems.
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SSD IDE4K 1.8'' and 2.5''
The SSD IDE4K 1.8" and 2.5" (formerly IDE 4000) are solid-state flash disks with no moving parts. The IDE4K provides capacities up to 8192 Mbytes (8 Gbytes) with improved cost structure, while supporting both PIO and DMA transfer modes.
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SSD IDEP
SSD IDEP is an ideal, rugged storage solution for mission-critical applications that must operate under harsh environmental conditions.
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MTRON SSD 32GB: Wile E. Coyote or Road Runner?

Date: August 15th, 2007
Topic: Storage
Manufacturer: Mtron
Author: Gary Key
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Solid State Drives are making great strides towards offering performance that matches and in some cases exceeds the best high-end consumer drives on the market in our limited benchmark results. We are in the early stages of testing several SSD products under an operating system (Vista) optimized for them. We also have a new test suite designed to emphasize actual applications that the typical business or home user might utilize on a daily basis, along with updated game benchmarks.While iPEAK and test applications like PCMark05 based on iPEAK have served us well and are certainly one of the best tools to show the pure performance capabilities of a storage device, it does not work properly under Vista. It is also getting long in the tooth as the ability to generate meaningful trace files with newer desktop chipsets, applications, and drive sizes is severely limited at this time. In fact, the results generated in our initial iPEAK benchmarks with the MTRON drive did not follow performance patterns in our upcoming application and operating results. This leads us to believe that current chipset and drive technology will soon surpass the capability of our test programs to properly generate meaningful results.Beyond that, as we found out with the MTRON drive your choice of core logic chipset can make a difference in the overall performance of the drive. Exactly why the latest Intel desktop chipsets have an apparent 80 MB/sec ceiling for sustained transfer rates with the SSD products is still a mystery to us and the drive manufacturers. We are still testing other Intel chipsets and will report these tests results and any updates from Intel or the drive manufacturers in our next article. In the meantime, using this drive with the Intel ICH9R provides the speed of Wile E. Coyote while we liken the NVIDIA 680i to the Road Runner: just a little faster and apparently a little smarter when it comes to SSD products.Our limited testing shows both the strengths and weaknesses of this particular drive when comparing it to one of the best performing consumer desktop drives. The read and write speeds are incredible for an SSD and its vastly superior access and random read rates generate very competitive scores in our application tests. Add to this the fact that the drive is completely silent, offers greatly improved thermals relative to pretty much any mechanical drive, and the ability to withstand extreme vibration and shock, and you have an absolute winner on your hands. Well, almost.Why almost? The two major weaknesses of this drive are its limited capacity and the very expensive price tag. Opening up your pocketbook for the current introductory price of $1499 will buy you one of the fastest drives for the desktop and certainly the fastest drive available in a 2.5" format for the portable market based upon our current test results. However, $1500 is the cost of a complete midrange notebook with 160GB of storage, and it's tough to look beyond that fact.These weaknesses will diminish over time, especially with NAND memory decreasing in price by 40% per year based on current averages. We doubt SSD products will make significant headway into the desktop market over the next three years due to the continued explosion of storage space requirements for digital entertainment. However, we do see it making serious inroads into the portable market over the same time period, along with exceptionally fast double digit growth in the commercial and industrial markets. Based upon what MTRON has delivered in this drive, we also foresee certain enthusiasts embracing this technology, provided the capacities and prices are more in alignment with each other.We want to thank DV Nation for providing our first truly performance oriented SSD drive. Our upcoming full review of this interesting yet expensive drive will concentrate on notebook operations along with a wider variety of application scores from our new test suite and the all important boot/stand-by/hibernation results. Until then, if you have deep pockets and are a road warrior who is constantly afraid of losing data due to handling mishaps - or a desktop enthusiast who can live with limited capacities - then we highly suggest taking a look into the new high performance SSD products from MTRON.

Drop your laptop: HP's Compaq line offers 64GB SSD option

By Todd Haselton Published: September 19, 2007 - 04:52PM CT
At a news conference in Taipei, HP announced that it will begin offering 64GB SSD drives in its business lineup of Compaq laptops. The drive will, at first, be available in the HP Compaq 2710p, 2510p, 6910p, and the 8000 series. HP plans to begin offering the SSD option in later models also, according to IDG News Service.
For those of you new to SSD drives, here's a quick refresher: they aim to act as a more reliable storage option, due to a lack of moving parts, and also consume less energy which results in longer battery life. I'd never thought of it in terms of weight, but HP claims that using a SSD drive drops the overall weight of its laptops about 25%, according to the article.
A quick visit to the HP Small & Medium business online store confirms that the drives are available in the Compaq series laptops. However, when I attempted to configure a Compaq 2710p tablet for purchase with a 64GB SSD drive, I noticed that the feature wasn't yet available from the customization menu, even though it's mentioned as a spec on the front page. I ran into the same problem with the other models as well.
In April, Dell announced that it would be using 1.8" 32GB SanDisk SSD drives in its Latitude D420 ultra-mobile PCs, and D620 rugged notebooks. More recently, Alienware announced that it would be offering not one, but two 64GB SSD drives in its Area-51 m975 notebook. Sony and Toshiba both also offer laptops with SSD options. While none of the major OEMs have announced notebooks with larger drives, a company called Super Talent has developed a 128GB SSD.
HP's pricing is spot on with Alienware's—the dual-64GB SSD option in the Area-51 costs an additional $2,000, while adding a single 64GB SSD to HP's Compaq line of business laptops will set you back $1,000.

Commercialization of SSD

SSD pioneers such as BiTMICRO Networks and MemTech have marketed solid state disks to the military and industrial markets since the mid-1990s. Afterwards, the enterprise sector also realized the benefits of using SSDs as cache for storage networks and began deploying SSDs in their systems.
SSDs have been appearing in ultra mobile PCs and a few light weight laptop systems, adding a US$ 200 to $800 premium to the systems, depending on the capacity, form factor and transfer speeds. Only a handful of companies offer large (64 GB or larger) SSD drives with write speeds adequate for replacing traditional drives, but these drives are available in limited quantities and are very expensive. Already Sandisk has begun shipping an affordable, fast, energy efficient drive priced at $350 to computer manufacturers. For low-end applications, a USB memory stick may be used as a Flash hard drive for around $10-$100, depending on capacity, or a CompactFlash card may be paired with a CF-to-IDE or CF-to-SATA converter at a similar cost. Either of these requires that write cycle endurance issues be managed, either by not storing frequently written files on the drive, or by using a Flash file system.
BiTMICRO launches flash memory-based solid state disks on January 7, 1999.[5]
Mtron announces the fastest flash memory solid state disk, performing 100MB/s Read, 80MB/s Write, 72,000 Max IOPS.[December 2005] [6]
[image : The Mtron SSD Read: 100MB/s Write: 80MB/s, 76,000 sequential / 16,000 random Max IOPS with less than 0.1ms access time]

Hyperdrive (storage) release the rev.4 designed to use 8 standard DDR ECC Registered memory modules on a native SATA and IDE interface. February 2007[7]
Adtron announced a 160 GB SATA SSD on February 20, 2007.[8]
Sandisk released a 32GB 2.5-inch solid state drive on March 13, 2007. The SSD SATA 5000 is being sold to computer manufacturers for $350. Sandisk has also released a 32GB 1.8-inch solid state drive on January 4, 2007.
Samsung has upped the capacity of its flash-based SSD line to 64GB on March 27, 2007.[9]
Super Talent Technology announced a 3.5-inch 128 GB Solid State Drive in April 2007.[10]
Dell has begun shipping ultra-portable laptops with Sandisk SSDs on April 26, 2007.[11]
Lexar ExpressCard SSD is shipping in 4GB, 8GB, and 16GB capacities. May 2007[12]
Power Quotient International (PQI) Announces 256GB SSD on 28 May 2007.[13]
Taiwanese A-DATA introduced at the Las Vegas CES 2007 SSD drives at capacities of 32GB, 64GB (1.8" model) and 128GB (2.5" model).[14] It is expected to be commercially available by mid-2007.[15]
SimpleTech has announced a 64GB SSD that is only 9.5mm thick, half the size of competing SSDs. On April 18, 2007 SimpleTech announced 256GB capacity enterprise level drives available immediately and 512GB capacity drives available late 2007.[16][17]
Sandisk announces 64GB SSDs of 1.8 UATA 5000 and 2.5 SATA 5000 on June 4, 2007[18]

SSD's Advantages

Faster startup - Since no spin-up required.
Far faster than conventional disks on random I/O
Extremely low read and write latency (seek) times, roughly 15 times faster than the best current mechanical disks.
Faster boot and application launch time when hard disk seeks are the limiting factor. See Amdahl's law.
In some cases, somewhat longer lifetime - Flash storage typically has a data lifetime on the order of 10 years before degradation. If data is periodically refreshed, it can store data indefinitely. Flash drives have limited endurance (typically, 100,000-300,000 write cycles), which, if a single block is written once per second, leads to failure in a few days at most. However, all flash drives employ a technique known as wear levelling, where writes are smoothly distibuted over all blocks. This means that if one write occurs per second, and n is the number of writes before failure and m is the number of blocks on the disk, failure no longer occurs in n seconds, but in (n*m) seconds. Given that blocks are typically on the order of 1kb and an 8 GB disk will have 8,192 blocks, this gives about 9,500 days before failure; remember also this is with one write per second for that entire time [1]. In consumer level devices you can expect the drive's data storage component to last roughly 10 years in normal use [4]

[image : The disassembled components of a hard disk drive (left) and of the PCB and components of a solid state drive (right). ]

However, it should be noted that certain SCSI hard drives have MTBF of 1.5 million hours (~175 years) and normal SATA harddrives have MTBF of 500,000 hours (~57 years). [5] The actual expected time-to-failure is typically several years, with manufacturers giving warranties of up to and around 5 years in consumer level products [6]. The high MTBFs are not calculated based on expected hard drive time to failure, but rather based on failure rates of hard drives without much wear.
Few to no mechanical parts
For small drives, lower power consumption and heat production.
For small hard drives, no noise - Lack of mechanical parts makes the SSD completely silent (many high-end SSDs include cooling fans).
Better mechanical reliability - Lack of mechanical parts results in less wear and tear. High level of ability to endure extreme shock, high altitude, vibration and temperatures[citation needed], which apply to laptops and other mobile devices, or when transported.
Security - allowing a very quick "wipe" of all data stored. [citation needed]
Relatively deterministic performance [7] - unlike mechanical hard drives, performance of SSDs is almost constant and deterministic across the entire storage. "Seek" time can be constant, and performance does not deteriorate as the media fills up (See: Fragmentation).
However, this is not always the case, as explained below. Flash memory is organised in blocks which can be erased, written or read, but only as whole blocks. The access time is the same for each block. If one or more blocks are used as Access Unit (AU), fragmentation has no harmful effect on access speed. However, for high capacity flash memories the AU would be too big, causing a lot of wasted bytes due to unused space within allocated AU's. Hence, in these cases each block is split up in a number of AU's. Initially AU's will be used sequentially within blocks. So a file with a size of N blocks will use no more than N+2 blocks, the first and last block only partially. However, after some time a situation will occur where no block is available of which all AU's are free, so that one or more extra blocks are needed The result is that said file will need more than N+2 blocks and accessing more blocks takes more time. In the worst case only one AE per block is free and said file will need S*N blocks, where S is the number of AE's per block. The conclusion is that, with bigger flash memory, fragmentation has a detoriating effect on access time.
For very low-capacity drives, lower weight and size. Size and weight per unit storage are still better for traditional hard drives, and microdrives allow up to 20GB storage in a CompactFlash 42.8×36.4×5 mm (1.7×1.4×.2 in) form factor.

About SSD

SSD is commonly comprised of either NAND flash (non-volatile) or SDRAM (volatile).
SSDs based on volatile memory such as SDRAM are categorized by fast data access, less than 0.01 milliseconds (over 250 times faster than the fastest hard drives in 2004) and are used primarily to accelerate applications that would otherwise be held back by the latency of disk drives.
DRAM-based SSDs typically incorporate internal battery and backup disk systems to ensure data persistence. If power is lost for whatever reason, the battery would keep the unit powered long enough to copy all data from random access memory (RAM) to backup disk. Upon the restoration of power, data is copied back from backup disk to RAM and the SSD resumes normal operation. [image : A high-performance RAM-based SSD]

However, most SSD manufacturers use nonvolatile flash memory to create more rugged and compact alternatives to DRAM-based SSDs. These flash memory-based SSDs, also known as flash drives, do not require batteries, allowing makers to replicate standard disk drive form factors (1.8-inch, 2.5-inch, and 3.5-inch). In addition, nonvolatility allows flash SSDs to retain memory even during sudden power outages, ensuring data retrievability. Just like DRAM SSDs, flash SSDs are extremely fast since these devices have no moving parts, eliminating seek time, latency and other electro-mechanical delays inherent in conventional disk drives. (Though flash SSDs are significantly slower than DRAM SSDs).

Solid state drives are especially useful on a computer which already has the maximum amount of RAM. For example, some x86 architectures have a 4 GB limit, but this can effectively be extended by putting the swap file on a SSD. These SSD do not provide as fast storage as main RAM because of the bandwidth bottleneck of the bus they connect to, but would still provide a performance increase over placing the swap file on a traditional hard disk drive.

DRAM based SSDs may also work like a buffer cache mechanism. Whenever data is written to memory, the corresponding block in memory is marked as dirty and all dirty blocks can be flushed to the actual hard drive based on the following two strategies: 1. Time (e.g. every 10 seconds, flush all dirty data), 2. Threshold (when the ratio of dirty data to SSD size exceeds some predetermined value, flush the dirty data).
[image : Open casing of 2.5” traditional hard disk drive (left) and solid state drive (center), a drop-in replacement for hard disk drives for mobile computing.]

Mtron Line Doubles SSD Performance

In what is likely to be a brief respite from mp3 players today Mtron has made an exciting speed breakthrough with its latest line of SDDs.The company has kicked out 16GB, 32GB and 64GB capacities in 2.5in and 3.5in form factors but the real kicker is it claims they will operate almost twice as fast as consumer orientated (ie: no silly money military stuff) models from their rivals.In spec sheet terms this means the range can operate with incredible read speeds of 120MBps and just as impressive write speeds of 90MBps. Compare this to SanDisk's entries (67MBps read, unknown write), Samsung (65MBps read, 45MBps write) and Adtron (70MBps read, 55MBps write) and you'll see why these drives - if they hold up under testing - could blow the roof off this fledgling sector.Mtron says its entire line of speedsters will launch before the end of September, but the dream model - a 128GB 1.8incher - won't appear until later in Q4.Sheesh, I really wanted an SSD before this announcement. Now when I lick my lips I taste a little foam...

Published : 5th September 2007 / Author : Gordon Kelly

Mtron will Launch New SSDs at IFA 2007

Seoul, Korea - August 16, 2007 - Mtron today announced it will launch a new solid state drive product lineup at IFA 2007 (the world's largest consumer electronics trade fair) in Berlin at the end of the month.
At IFA 2007, Mtron will show new product lines optimized for 3 main market segments:- Standard (consumer), PRO (server applications) and XTM (Industrial). These will be available in volume (50K to 100K units / month production plan) from September. Mtron's current SSD product line includes 2.5" and 3.5" SATA interface based products, with capacities of 16GB, 32GB and 64GB. Mtron says its new products are 3 - 4 times faster than existing HDDs and 30% - 40% faster than any other currently available flash SSDs - with maximum read / write speeds of more than 100MB/s and 80MB/s respectively, and random access time of less than 0.1ms. Jack Han, director of Mtron's marketing department said "Mtron SSD is the best solution for high-end servers and notebook PCs that need faster speed, higher durability, lower power consumption and no noise. Mtron will launch new product lineup targeted for specific industry areas in order to satisfy the wide range of needs in the SSD market..." ...Mtron profile, Storage Events