Mobile device driver panel – Storage Visions 2011
January 4, 2011, Storage Visions, Las Vegas—an Intel-sponsored panel looked at new storage architectures for mobile devices. Melissa Perenson from PC World was the moderator. The panel consisted of Troy Winslow from Intel, Luke Choi from Hitachi data storage, Kevin silver from NVELO, Conrad Maxwell fro SATA-IO and Silicon Image, and Doreet Oren from SanDisk. Doug Dumitru from EasyCo and Eden Kim from Calypso filled out the group.
Winslow claimed that the superior technologies always win, but the industry is not catching the SSD wave. Examples of changing technologies include CRTs that were cheap and functional but have been displaced by LCD or plasma panels which are more expensive but higher performance. Carburetors were replaced by fuel injection.
The current issue with HDDs is that they are cheap but SSDs have a lower total cost of ownership when maintenance and performance are included in the comparison. A more likely scenario is to have some type of hybrid with SSD for performance and HDD for mass storage. For example, a PC might have a SSD for boot and applications and a HDD for other storage.
For mobile devices, a dual drive or even any hard disk just doesn’t fit. The form factors and the need for low power consumption prevent the HDD from working well in these applications. Instead, look to see SSDs integrated onto the motherboard for operating systems and applications. The very small footprints possible for SSDs facilitate their user in even small form factor devices. The only problem is that these SSDs are fairly low capacity, since large SSDs are too expensive for consumer products, unlike their use in enterprise applications.
For the few 10’s of GB needed for consumer products, a SSD may reduce total system cost. When was the last time you tired to buy a 16 GB HDD? Now if you wanted something that size, you could not find a new one on the market at any price. As a result, SSD will replace HDD for mobile storage because the HDD is too big and uses too much power for the mobile storage functions.
Choi introduced the concept of an integrated optical drive and SSD. For laptop computers which already have an optical drive, integrating the SSD saves space compared to installing the SSD on the motherboard. The SSD can be used in two modes, as a booster 8GB read cache or as a boot drive and application storage unit. The combination can save power by pre-loading data into the SSD and putting the ODD into sleep mode. It can also reduce system power while improving performance by performing peer-peer copies and transfers without CPU involvement.
Oren added that the SSD will always have a smaller form factor than any HDD because there are no motors. The SSDs also reduce power, size and increase performance. By including the cost of power and the costs of HDD replacement during the computer’s useful life, SSDs cost less to own than the HDD. The products and trends driving the industry away from HDDs are tablets, ultra-thin laptops, and the ability to store large amounts of data on the cloud.
Silver suggested using SSDs as a next level cache. The rationale for an SSD cache is the requirement that non-volatile storage is at least 4 times the size of the system memory. The mobile systems need higher speed, lower power data access and the variety of access types—random and streaming. This makes it hard for any single type of storage to be optimal. The challenge is that SSDs need software to perform wear leveling and other drive management functions, consuming CPU and memory resources. If the form factor is important and the system performance metrics are adverse to high-speed HDDs, then SSDs can bridge the gaps.
Maxwell stated that the serial SATA-IO organization is developing new versions and support platforms to include mSATA (m for mobile) devices. The new specifications include a mini-PCI connector. All together, the organization is looking at a completely changed ecosystem for storage. Another version, eSATA/USB is able to use the USB power supplies to power the drive. Version 3.1 will be released in Q1 of ’11. A universal storage module specification is expected in April this year and a TV removable specification is due in the first half of ’11. other organizations working on new specifications include the Open Nand Flash Initiative, which is working on standards to simplify NAND flash integration and the Trusted Computing Group, which is focused on open, vendor-neutral, industry standards for trusted computing building blocks and software interfaces across multiple platforms.
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