Blog Archives

Overcoming The Challenges With SSD Reliability

Posted on June 3, 2013 by George Crump

Articles posted on the Storage Switzerland web site that focus on SSD Reliability are consistently among the top read articles on our site. Clearly there is concern about using the technology in the enterprise and IT planners want to know…

Tagged with: Flash memory, Hard disk drive, Hardware, Solid-state drive, SSD, Storage
Posted in Article

The Unknown Risk of SSD Mapping Tables

Posted on May 16, 2013 by George Crump

Solid State Disks (SSD) and Flash Appliances use mapping tables to track where data is stored on the flash device. These tables play a similar role to iNode or File Allocation Tables (FAT) and if they get corrupted or lost,…

Tagged with: DRAM, Dynamic random-access memory, Flash, Flash memory, Hard disk drive, Non-volatile memory, Skyera, Solid-state drive
Posted in Article

Improving SSD Performance Through Better Flash Management

Posted on April 15, 2013 by George Crump

Solid State Drive (SSD) storage has become a viable performance option thanks to the advent of NAND flash devices which are making memory-based storage affordable. The performance of an SSD is not solely dictated by the NAND but by the…

Tagged with: DRAM, Flash memory, Granularity, Micron, Solid-state drive, SSD
Posted in Article

Power Failure and Flash Storage

Posted on April 10, 2013 by George Crump

There has been a lot of discussion lately about the issue of power failures in flash based solid state storage systems. In various tests run by industry associations flash based solid state disk (SSD) devices, when subjected to a sudden power-loss,…

Video Review of Sonnet Tempo And Samsung 840 Pro SSD

Posted on March 22, 2013 by George Crump

Next up in our lab is a review of the Sonnet Tempo PCIe SSD Card and the Samsung 840 Pro SSD. Once again we leveraged the OWC Helios as part of the test exchanging the OWC Accelsior with the Samsung…

Tagged with: Flash memory, Hard disk drive, PCI Express, Personal computer, Samsung, Samsung 840, Samsung 840 Pro, SATA, Serial ATA, Solid-state drive, Sonnet Tempo
Posted in Blog, Video

Boosting Server Performance

Posted on February 22, 2013 by Colm Keegan

SSD Performance Accelerated A typical flash implementation constitutes less than 1% of the overall storage provisioned in a typical production environment. Consequently, systems planners have to exercise extreme prudence when deciding how to best utilize flash storage. They have to…

Tagged with: Dynamic random-access memory, Flash memory, Intel, IOPS, Solid-state drive, SSD, Virtual machine, VMware
Posted in Briefing Note

The Cost of Over-Provisioning Flash Arrays

Posted on February 5, 2013 by George Crump

All-Flash Arrays have to overcome two key obstacles when trying to gain acceptance as storage systems which can be utilized across a wide number of use cases in the data center. First, they must be durable and secondly, they must…

Tagged with: All-Flash Array, Data center, Flash memory, Skyera, Solid State, Solid-state drive
Posted in Article

Easy, Effective and Efficient Server SSD Caching

Posted on January 14, 2013 by Eric Slack

SSDs (solid state devices) are becoming more mainstream and now ‘placement’ technologies like caching are getting increased attention as users strive to get the most out of their solid state investments. Caching primary disk storage with NAND flash can improve…

Tagged with: Cache, Flash memory, HyperCache, Linux, Solid-state drive, SSD, VeloBit, VMware, Windows
Posted in Product Analysis

Cutting The Price On 1 Million IOPS

Posted on November 1, 2012 by George Crump

Marvell is a leader in the development of storage, communications and consumer silicon solutions, basically they provide vendors with key components so they can deliver complete solutions to end users. Recently Marvell announced the 88N9145 native PCIe SSD controller which…

Is it Time for Hybrid SSD RAID Controllers?

Posted on October 23, 2012 by Eric Slack

Server side SSD caching solutions are popular implementation choices for performance upgrades because they allow users to put the performance right where it’s needed, in the application server itself. For many of these use cases, a direct attached disk array…