back to article Enterprise flash: The good, the bad and the cloudy

As flash tech firms face up to each other like gunslingers in a Wild West shoot-out, El Reg presents these suppliers or supplier groups developing NAND products for, hopefully, appreciative customers. We've found higher capacity and faster flash, faster-connecting flash and, you knew it was coming, cloud flash. NVMe This …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "How long is the endurance now?"

    A good question, and one not answered by the waffle. So I'm going to guess, and I'm going to guess the number is actually too low to be marketable so it's somewhere where you'll feel positively uneasy about the thing holding your data. TLC? >30nm process? A hundred cycles, two hundred if you're lucky. I think that's optimistic. The controller shuffle is where the "many variables" come in, and a great excuse for some marketeering and obfuscation. But not something I'll trust without backups to disk AND tape.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      A little bit better than that....

      So I would expect better cycling capability than 200 but unlikely to be better than 1000 cycles. So these devices will wear out fast. Other vendors are going to smaller lithography for the flash rather than using TLC. It's a clearer way forward bearing in mind the performance requirements of a drive vs a memory card.

    2. Matt Bryant Silver badge
      Thumb Up

      RE: "How long is the endurance now?"

      Agreed. It's interesting to note that, despite all the hype around flash, we're currently seeing a shortage of good, ol' spinning disks due to the floods in Thailand, but no-one seems too worried about flash. Flash has a long, long way to go to replace spinning disk.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      fusion-io offer a 3 year / 5 petabyte warrenty on their cards afaik

  2. Jonski
    Joke

    Cloud Flash?

    I believe the correct term is "lightning". Or is that something else?!?

  3. cd_mccall

    Flash at a perpetual $/GB premium to disk

    As flash continues to improve performance and reliability I can't help but think that the evil marketing people that work for the flash technology vendors will position these superior capabilities as advantages over disk and charge a premium for it. So even if the $/GB cost to mfg flash becomes equivalent to disk drives over the next few years, flash will be positioned as superior technology and maintain a price premium. That begs the question of when will Seagate, Hitatchi, and Western Digital start pulling the trigger on acquisitions in this space as a way to counter share shift and bolster portfolio margins.

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