Solid-state hard drive manufacturers need to unite and establish an umbrella organisation that establishes standards that define the technology, such as performance, according to Sun Microsystems.
Michael Cornwell, lead technologist for flash memory at Sun, said the SSD industry, while in its infancy, has organisations establishing separate standards around SSD metrics, and there is not enough work being done to standardise them.
"We don't see a focus among suppliers and vendors like ourselves because everyone looks at their implementation [individually] rather than as an industry implementation," Cornwell said.
A standards organisation could help users measure SSDs and their applications, like the performance of SSDs in comparison to hard drives, Cornwell said. SSDs have attracted criticism for being expensive while providing less storage compared to hard drives.
Analysis: Solid-state vs hard-disk drives
Price-per-gigabyte could continue to be a relative issue when comparing SSDs to hard drives, but SSDs are more about performance than price, Cornwell said. SSDs don't have the capacity of hard-disk drives, but they perform better in certain environments. SSDs could be more relevant for data centres, for example, where they are comparatively faster and more power efficient than hard drives.
"The traditional storage market is completely focused on 'well, what's the cost-per gigabyte?' We look at 'what's the cost for meeting your performance metric' and design systems around that architecture rather than capacity," Cornwell said.
The SSD industry could use an organisation like IDEMA (International Disk Drive Equipment and Materials Association), an organisation that sets standards and guidelines for disk development, Cornwell said. IDEMA establishes industry standards and provides guidance on technology to vendors including heads and media in disk drives.
Without mentioning names, Cornwell said Sun is talking to other companies about the development of standards. Last month, Sun worked with Samsung to bump up the durability of SSDs, announcing the development of single-level cell flash chips capable of lasting 500,000 read/write cycles, higher than the 100,000 read-and-write cycles of earlier SLC-based flash memory.
A number of organisations developing SSD standards independently include T13, a committee for the International Committee on Information Technology Standards (INCITS), which defined standards for ATA (Advanced Technology Attachment) storage interface. Through standards organisation JEDEC (Joint Electron Device Engineering Council), Seagate and Micron are trying to establish some SSD standards, including the definition of form factors.
SSD adoption will be driven by Web 2.0 applications, Cornwell said. Web 2.0 applications mainly reside in data centres, and distributed applications on SSDs in different nodes could deliver "phenomenal" performance, Cornwell said. For example, delivering cached photo content from an SSD may be quicker than getting it from a disk drive.
Sun has said it will include SSDs in storage products later this year.
Comments
james braselton said: HI THERE I AM A HARD CORE GAMMER SO A SSD IN MY GAMMING CONSOLE WOULD HELP US OUT ALOT
George Purrio, European techni said: I agree that SSD companies must work together to produce standards that provide users with the information they need on this new technologyPresently SSDs are criticised for being too expensive having a limited range of products and users being unsure of the advantages and reliability of the device I understand that a number of organisations are establishing their own standards for SSD technology independently but this is not enough to convince businesses and consumers A unified standard across the industry would provide the confidence of a kitemark that users really need before they entrust their precious data to an SSDThrough establishing standards SSD companies could help to abolish the lack of knowledge on the reliability of the SSDs by helping users measure their performance Producing standards for SSDs could provide the reassurance that users need to take the risk in adopting this new emerging technology and assist with their growth in the storage market