December 24, 2015 at 10:11[Information post] Interesting facts from the history of solid state drives
Hello Giktayms! Despite the widespread belief that solid-state drives are an achievement of technology for the last ten to fifteen years, the first devices of this type appeared back in 1978 in the United States. StorageTek (now defunct) was the first manufacturer of a semiconductor drive using volatile memory . What else has happened since the advent of the SSD - read under the cat.
At the time of the advent of solid-state drives, the cost of one gigabyte of RAM memory was about one million US dollars, and of course, the first buyers were oil companies, which required very efficient processing of data on seismic activity.
The storage system has been a bottleneck for supercomputers since their inception, so Seymour Cray used semiconductor memory in his brainchild Cray-1 and Cray X-MP , while competitors' products used ferromagnetic cores. It was 1982, until the advent of commercial flash memory, only 6 years remained.
First , in 1988, Intel showed the world samples of NOR flash memory, and in 1989, Toshiba introduced the NAND flash. What to do with such happiness? Application was found after a few more years. Employees of the Israeli company M-Systems presented a unique development: DiskOnChip- the microcircuit is fully externally compatible with the standard BIOS microcircuit in the DIP 28/32 package, but working as a flash drive. At first, there were many problems, they started from a small capacity (only 2-4 megabytes), and compatibility left much to be desired.
The second version of DiskOnChip was released in 1997, the maximum volume was already as much as 24 megabytes, and soon grew to 144, allowing you to burn Windows as a whole to a single flash memory chip. This format led the device to success and spawned the massive use of technology in embedded computers.
By the way, the same company proposed another amazing idea - DiskOnKey, in its present form - an ordinary flash drive. In 2000, when these devices appeared on the market, they had a capacity of 8, 16 or 32 megabytes and cost about $ 100. By the way, the M-Systems company also does not exist now - in 2006 it was absorbed by SanDisk (the deal amounted to 1.55 billion US dollars).
However, back to the solid state drives. One of the branches of development led to the DOM - DiskOnModule , which are used in embedded systems, but desktop computers for ordinary home users have become the second direction.
For the first time, PATA SSDs appeared on sale in 2000. The maximum capacity was 19 gigabytes, and read and write speeds reached 11 MB / s with an average access time of 200 ms. By the way, the price of such devices reached 42,000 USD.
In November 2002, Bill Gates spoke about the need for mass implementation of solid-state drives , predicting a reduction in the size of devices and the impossibility of a commensurate reduction in mechanical disks.
2005 was a landmark year for the solid-state drive market, the first SATA disks with a capacity of 128 gigabytes in 2.5 ”format appeared and large companies, in particular Samsung, began to look at this market segment. The following year, as I mentioned, Sandisk took over M-Systems and launched the big “arms race”. In November 2006, Microsoft officially announced the new Windows Vista system , the first OS on the market with native support for SSD drives and SSD cache management.
The era of acquisitions, purchases and announcements began, then every year the development of solid-state drives went by leaps and bounds, new controllers appeared, the process technology decreased, new types of memory appeared, old players left, new ones took their place until the end of 2015. On the threshold of the new 2016, we can confidently say that the future will be even brighter and more technological than it seemed ten years ago.
Thanks for watching and stay with Kingston on the Guktime!
The storage system has been a bottleneck for supercomputers since their inception, so Seymour Cray used semiconductor memory in his brainchild Cray-1 and Cray X-MP , while competitors' products used ferromagnetic cores. It was 1982, until the advent of commercial flash memory, only 6 years remained.
First , in 1988, Intel showed the world samples of NOR flash memory, and in 1989, Toshiba introduced the NAND flash. What to do with such happiness? Application was found after a few more years. Employees of the Israeli company M-Systems presented a unique development: DiskOnChip- the microcircuit is fully externally compatible with the standard BIOS microcircuit in the DIP 28/32 package, but working as a flash drive. At first, there were many problems, they started from a small capacity (only 2-4 megabytes), and compatibility left much to be desired.
The second version of DiskOnChip was released in 1997, the maximum volume was already as much as 24 megabytes, and soon grew to 144, allowing you to burn Windows as a whole to a single flash memory chip. This format led the device to success and spawned the massive use of technology in embedded computers.
By the way, the same company proposed another amazing idea - DiskOnKey, in its present form - an ordinary flash drive. In 2000, when these devices appeared on the market, they had a capacity of 8, 16 or 32 megabytes and cost about $ 100. By the way, the M-Systems company also does not exist now - in 2006 it was absorbed by SanDisk (the deal amounted to 1.55 billion US dollars).
However, back to the solid state drives. One of the branches of development led to the DOM - DiskOnModule , which are used in embedded systems, but desktop computers for ordinary home users have become the second direction.
For the first time, PATA SSDs appeared on sale in 2000. The maximum capacity was 19 gigabytes, and read and write speeds reached 11 MB / s with an average access time of 200 ms. By the way, the price of such devices reached 42,000 USD.
In November 2002, Bill Gates spoke about the need for mass implementation of solid-state drives , predicting a reduction in the size of devices and the impossibility of a commensurate reduction in mechanical disks.
2005 was a landmark year for the solid-state drive market, the first SATA disks with a capacity of 128 gigabytes in 2.5 ”format appeared and large companies, in particular Samsung, began to look at this market segment. The following year, as I mentioned, Sandisk took over M-Systems and launched the big “arms race”. In November 2006, Microsoft officially announced the new Windows Vista system , the first OS on the market with native support for SSD drives and SSD cache management.
The era of acquisitions, purchases and announcements began, then every year the development of solid-state drives went by leaps and bounds, new controllers appeared, the process technology decreased, new types of memory appeared, old players left, new ones took their place until the end of 2015. On the threshold of the new 2016, we can confidently say that the future will be even brighter and more technological than it seemed ten years ago.
Thanks for watching and stay with Kingston on the Guktime!