SSD Archives - Unpacked Network

#138 – Storage Predictions for 2020 (Part I)

Chris Evans 10 January 2020Garbage Collection

This week Chris and Martin are joined by Chris Mellor for what is turning into an annual look at storage technology for the year ahead. We should point out that this is only for enterprise storage and not a forecast on the world in general! We start with a discussion on media. At the macro level, capacities continue to grow for SSDs and HDDs year on year. This trend is expected to continue, but what micro-level advancements are being made? QLC increases in layers, while PLC (penta-level cell) flash is being mooted as increasingly more …

#117 – Introduction to Computational Storage with NGD Systems

Chris Evans 13 September 2019Guest Speakers, Storage Hardware, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week’s episode is the final recording from Flash Memory Summit 2019. Chris is joined by the team from NGD Systems for a discussion on Computational Storage. On this podcast are Scott Shadley, VP of Marketing, Nader Salessi, CEO and Ashok Savdharia who has the lovely title of “technologist”. Computational storage uses the processing power of modern SSD controllers to run application workloads directly on the SSD itself. Imagine each drive being a mini blade server, with compute, memory and storage. In the case of NGD Systems, this means a range of devices and form …

#87 – The Risks of Storage Media Reuse versus Recycling

Chris Evans 15 February 2019Guest Speakers, Storage Hardware, Storage Unpacked Podcast

In this episode, Chris and Martin talk to Simon Zola from Avtel Data Destruction. This is a follow-up episode to #85 (Storage for Home and Homelabs) where Martin and Chris questioned the ease of recovering data from pre-owned storage media. As we find out, the process was pretty easy. Martin was able to recover significant amounts of personal data with little effort and using standard tools. Media destruction is one route to safely dispose of drives and guarantees that data is destroyed. But what are the consequences? Simply disabling a drive and throwing it into …

#79 – Learning More About QLC Storage with Steve Hanna

Chris Evans 14 December 2018All-Flash, Guest Speakers

This week Chris and Martin talk to Steve Hanna, Senior Product Manager for Enterprise SSDs at Micron. Steve looks after the 5210 ION QLC SSD product line, which was introduced earlier this year. As an evolution of existing flash technology, QLC offers greater capacities at lower cost. But what are the issues? The conversation covers how QLC has reduced the price to 1/100th of that seen in early enterprise SSDs. Although endurance is lower than previous flash generations, in reality for many use cases the ability to write up to 1 DWPD is enough. However, …

#55 – Storage for Hyperscalers

Chris Evans 29 June 2018Cloud, Guest Speakers, Storage Unpacked Podcast

This week we talk to Mark Carlson, co-chair of the SNIA Technical Council, about the storage needs of hyperscalers. Mark defines hyperscalers as those companies opening multiple data centres a year, most notably Amazon, Microsoft Azure, Google and Facebook in the US and Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent in China. These vendors are deploying petabytes of storage a year, with specific requirements on storage media. The hyperscaler applications have issues with HDD and SSD performance characteristics, such as tail latency and the effects of garbage collection. As a result, drive manufacturers are building in new features …

#44 – Ultra High Capacity Flash Drives

Chris Evans 30 March 2018Garbage Collection

This week, Chris and Martin discuss the availability of super-high capacity or ultra-capacity flash drives. The conversation comes out of an announcement from Nimbus Data that has produced a 100TB SATA SSD. This follows up from last year’s 50TB drives that were OEMed to Viking and Smart Modular. You can find some more background at Architecting IT here. With so much capacity in a single 3.5″ form factor that could cost upwards of $50,000, is this product practical? How do the drives survive failure? Can they be repaired and who would build systems from them? …

#34 – NAND Shortage? What NAND Shortage! with Jim Handy

Chris Evans 19 January 2018Guest Speakers

In this week’s podcast, the team chat again with Jim Handy from Objective Analysis. Jim is an analyst covering the semiconductor industry and provides some great insight into where pricing is headed in the NAND flash market. The conversation covers some of the technical challenges the industry faces, as well as the impact from China entering the market. Finally, the guys discuss the impact on Enterprise storage pricing. There are some interesting observations in this conversation, such as the capability for NAND to be used in multiple densities and how the ability for the Enterprise …