Tag: SSDs

Sandisk increases channel purview

Posted on April 8, 2015 by - News

datacenterFlash storage company Sandisk said today it has introduced an enterprise reseller partner programme for its worldwide partners.

Sandisk said it will add support, resources and rewards to existing VARs who qualify to resell its enterprise products.

The reason for the expansion is that flash tech delivers better performance and efficiences for data centres.

The enterprise programme is for Sandisk Commercial business channel partners that re-sell Sandisk hardware and software data centre products, including CloudSpeed SATA drives, caching software, and Optimus SAS solid state drives.

Some of the benefits of joining up include education and training, certification, a web based partner portal, and incentive programmes. There will also be a volume incentive rebate for particular resellers.

 

Flash drives still have problems

Posted on February 26, 2015 by - News

flash_gordon (1)Kroll Ontrack, a company which specialises in data recovery, claimed that while nearly 90 percent of the people they surveyed used solid state drives (SSD), a third claimed they had some malfunctions.

Obviously Kroll has something of an axe to grind here, but it has surveyed over 2,000 people in the survey.

Of the SSDs which showed a malfunction, over 60 percent lost data and less than 20 percent managed to recover their data.

The reason it’s difficult to recover data is because it’s scattered on the drive, compared to hard disk drives, where the information is stored linearly, according to Paul Le Messier, operations manager at Kroll.

SSDs, however, are steadily become more popular both for enterprises and individuals. Of those surveyed, three quarters use flash drives in laptops and mobiles, 60 percent in desktop PCs, and 20 percent in servers.

The main attractions are performance and speed.

With the increasing usage of SDDs however, Kroll has averaged a 100 percent increase in recovery requests year on year from 2011 to 2014.

 

Flash worth $2.9 billion last year

Posted on January 29, 2015 by - News

storageFlash storage hauled in revenues of close to $3 billion last year in the European region.
IDC said that even though it’s a relatively new tech, its adoption is “soaring@.
Total capacity of flash based arrays reached 3.53 exabytes last year, and the market itself grew year on year by 32 percent.
Flash array systems is growing in data centres but there’s still a high dollar per gigabyte price to pay, compared to conventional hard drives.
Western Europe accounted for 75 percent of revenues in 2014 with UK, Germany and France leading the pack.
IDC predicts that the flash storage market will grow at 15 percent CAGR right through until 2018. Conventional hard drives will still have a place in the enterprise, but largely as back up media.

 

Solid state drive prices to topple

Posted on January 23, 2015 by - News

ssdVolumes of scale mean the prices of solid state drives (SSDs) are set to fall.
Digitimes, quoting the technology manager of memory company Apacer, is estimating that prices for, example, of 256GB SSDs will tumble to as little as $70 in the second half of this year.
And a 128GB SSD could cost as little as $40 by year end, according to manager CK Chang.
He reckons that the price drops could well stimulate a far greater demand for the storage devices.
One of the reasons the prices are falling is because process technologies for the type of NAND flash memory used is migrating to 14 nanometre, 16 nanometre or 16 nanometre processes.
That means manufacturers get more NAND memory from a single silicon wafer.

 

Storage sales down in 2013

Posted on February 11, 2014 by - News

ihs_storageShipments of storage products fell by five percent last year, said market research company IHS.

However, solid state drive shipments in 2013 doubled and the reason for the decline in the whole sector is because of contractions in the hard drive and optical disk drive sectors.

Shipments of storage including SSDs, conventional hard drives and optical drives totalled 755 million units. HDDs fell by seven percent to 444.4 million units, optical drives fell by 12 percent to 253 million units while SSDs rose by 82 percent to 57 million units, said IHS. The figures do not include non PC related drives.

The convential HDD sector suffered from the increase in the popularity of smartphones and tablets.  However, the enterprise PC sector is more promising than the consumer end of the show.

SSDs are likely to rise by 50 percent during 2014, reaching 189 million units in 2017, which will be half the size of the HDD market which is expected to total 397 million in that year.