SSD Vendors Getting Serious About Standards

Implications: * JEDEC is a memory standards body that is very active and respected in the electronics industry  * JEDEC has formed a committee to develop standards for NAND flash solid state drives  * The JEDEC committee will be co-chaired by Micron and Seagate  * Seagate expects to announce their first SSD product for the enterprise market by the end of 2008  * The JEDEC standardization effort is part of a standards movement for SSDs that involves a newly formed SSD Alliance, IDEMA and the ANSI T13 committee

Analysis: Solid state disk drives are starting to appear in systems.  In the computer market these products are targeted at the enterprise (high performance) or laptop markets.  The SSD products for each of these products are very different because of their difference performance and reliability requirements and flash memory will play different roles in these two markets.  Solid state drives have gotten a lot of press and some wild claims have been made concerning power savings, reliability and other important characteristics with little actual supporting data.  

In the past few months there have arisen a number of standard efforts to deal with difference between HDDs and SSDs, ways to test for performance and reliability, reliability specifications and form factors.  Some of these standards activities are overlapping and jurisdiction for the various standards will have to be ironed out between the various groups.  

JEDEC Committee JC 64.8 will be responsible for defining new form factors, leveraging existing interface standards, specification of environmental requirements, electrical quality, reliability and durability methods and procedures.  The IDEMA reliability standards group, lead by Jon Elerath from NetApp has gathered a group of HDD and SDD vendors to define new reliability specifications.   

The SSD Alliance (formed by a number of Taiwan based companies) will release its initial specification for SSD testing in July 2008.  The SSD Alliance plans to pull in chip makers as well as PC vendors into the standards effort.  The ANSI T13 committee is responsible for the ATA interface specifications.  This committee has created some new standards for SSD memory management based upon different memory requirements for SSDs vs. HDDs.  

At the just completed Memcon conference SanDisk announced new standard proposals for SSD endurance testing--Longterm Data Endurance (LDE) and performance.   It will be interesting to see what becomes of these standards and where this standard-making activity will be done.  

Standard setting is an important requirement in bringing new products to market.  Without standardized measures, commands and testing it is hard to compare SSD products with each other and with HDDs.  This makes it difficult for vendors to incorporate SSDs into computer and other products and make it difficult for the SSD vendors to deliver consistent products and to anticipate their performance and reliability in the field.