Enough Already

For years the question, “How much is enough?” has been debated regarding NAND flash endurance. How many write cycles do you really need over the lifetime of a camera card or memory stick? How long do you need your portable data to stay intact?

SI’s senior memory analyst, Young Choi, attended the recent Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara to hear what the vendors are saying about solid-state drives, or SSD’s. As NAND flash prepares to reach out and grab a chunk of the hard disk drive market, it will face even more scrutiny as we will all demand more endurance from the SSD’s that are just beginning to show up in select computers. As Young noted, “The overall impression is that the market is still in its infancy and it will take quite a while before enterprises and consumers adopt systems with SSDs.” And that was certainly the view of Fujitsu who cautiously observed, “the market and consumer are not happy about SSD overall.”

Participants were focused on three areas – performance, endurance and price. Many experts are calling for standardization of SSD performance metrics to eliminate the current state of confusion over SSD performance metrics. That would help avoid the “benchmarketing” we are often forced to suffer in this industry.

When I mentioned the NAND flash endurance debates of the past, I was alluding to the MLC versus SLC wars that have been waged over the years (often with Toshiba and Samsung as the respective combatants). The key information returned from the Summit was based on a usage model of 20GB per day for the typical consumer. This means that MLC NAND flash could provide sufficient lifetimes for consumer SSD products.

Several summit participants tried to predict the future of the SSD market by comparing it to the HDD market of long ago. Expect some major rounds of consolidation considering that there are more than 70 SSD manufacturers today.

But it seems like there is more driving SSD technology than simple bits and drive endurance. There is a shade of green overtaking the SSD conversation. Yes, saving energy and “going green” is a big part of the talk about SSD’s. At the Summit, the local California utility, PG&E, promoted the need to reduce energy demands through technological innovation. Their example was the power consumed by large data centers which can be reduced by transitioning to SSD.

Young mentioned that Intel will have some interesting things to discuss at the Intel Developer Forum August 19 through 21. Intel may concentrate on the controller for SSD, and this may actually be the key component to making NAND work in the SSD. The way operating systems use the hard disk is really tough on flash. For robust SSD’s in our future laptops, we will be relying on Intel and others to implement intelligent control and management of which physical memory locations are used to even out the wear over the whole flash chip over the life of the product. SanDisk has proposed their own version that they are calling LDE or Long Term Data Endurance.

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