THE INTERVIEW
Joshua Carr is Channel Account Manager for Intel ANZ. We spoke to him about SSD tech today, and into tomorrow
Anyone who owns an SSD knows what a fantastic upgrade they are to improve a computer’s overall performance. In the enterprise area where time literally is money, SSDs are used increasingly to speed up servers, and much like how the advances in F1 car racing trickles down to our road cars, advances in enterprise SSDs trickle down to consumer SSDs that we can plug in to our laptops, workstations and of course our gaming rigs.
Intel is a big player in both enterprise and consumer level SSD storage. The company is usually quick to bring what it learns from the enterprise into the mainstream, and we recently spoke to Joshua Carr, Channel Account Manager for Intel Australia and New Zealand. Joshua shared with us some of the trends going forward from this enterprise to mainstream transition of SSD technology.
One such technology gaining traction in the mainstream is NVMe, but Josh insists SATA still has a place in Intel’s line-up, saying that, “The direction for the future is a move from SATA to NVMe. It is expected there will likely be legacy SATA for low cost platforms for some time. How quick this transition occurs really depends on ecosystem adoption and many factors.”
Another interesting shift that consumers will need to consider is the evolution away from familiar form factors. There’s no specific need for the traditional 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch sizes, or indeed a SATA plug, with Joshua explaining that NVMe SSDs come in three basic forms; “there are add-in-Card (CEM), U.2 (2.5-inch U.2 or SFF-8639) and M.2. M.2 is the only form factor with limitations, but this is in the context of high performance systems. M.2 drives today have to deal with temperatures by throttling during long durations of sequential write activity. But this is only an issue for systems where large data sets are used requiring a lot of write cycles.”
The physical size of M.2 devices may be a more tangible limiting factor, with Joshua telling PC & Tech Authority that, “You can only fit so much media on an M.2 form factor. Again this isn’t usually an issue for the average consumer system where 1TB is more than enough. However, for workstations and high performance gaming systems more capacity is required. Our Intel 750 PCIE NVMe Drives are currently available in two form factors: add in card and 2.5-inch U.2.”
In the past, NVMe drives were not bootable and struggled in RAID arrays, but Joshua assures us that is no longer the case, explaining, “Bootability is no longer a limitation with NVMe SSDs since we enabled the ODMs and BIOS vendors. However, if you want to use a RAID array of NVMe drives today, it needs to be attached to the PCH in order to be a bootable volume.”
The plummeting price of NAND flash memory has impacted mainstream adoption of SSDs. Most of this cheap memory is triple level cell ( TLC) based, as opposed to multilevel cell (MLC), which is generally seen as superior. Joshua however, confirms TLC memory’s place in the market,
saying that at Intel, “We don’t think TLC will be held back at all in the future. Hybrid solutions will provide very good options that allow TLC to keep the cost of the storage solutions low.”
Once again, it is important to consider how the storage will be used. “For usage workloads where the data sets are very large and therefore require much larger storage transactions, the odds of exceeding a buffer or cache of high performance media is greater, and therefore SSDs based solely on high performance media are ideal. However, for a lot of client workloads where transactions are actually quite small, the odds of exceeding the cache is very low, TLC and TLC hybrid drives are very cost effective.”
When it comes to what we’ll see in regards to SSD storage in the future, Joshua points to Intel’s massive R&D efforts, and in particular a new memory technology that has everyone excited: “Intel has also announced breakthrough non-volatile memory technology called 3D XPoint™ Technology, which is 1000x faster than NAND, 1000x the endurance of NAND and 10x denser than conventional memory.”
While we eagerly await the first products using XPoint™ technology, it all points to where the industry is heading and why Intel is the industry leader to watch in
solid state storage.