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Joe James of Super Talent |
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Interview by Josh Walrath |
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Solid State Drives (SSDs) are certainly creating a buzz around the industry, but the prices for even modest sized SSDs are still incredibly high as compared to standard hard drives. What kind of usage are you aiming these first drives at, and when would you likely expect these drives to be adopted in more traditional desktop usage? Our current range of SSDs are mainly intended for military and industrial applications. They are expensive, but they’re far more rugged and reliable, support wider temperature ranges, and use a fraction of the power of hard drives. We have a bunch of SSD products in development, so you’ll just have to wait and see what we come up with next. =D Non-volatile flash only has so many read/write cycles that they can perform, how are you getting past this physical limitation to offer SSD products with acceptable failure rates when compared to traditional platter based drives? Our SLC NAND based SSDs can support infinite read cycles and so many write/erase cycles that they’re not likely to wear out in my lifetime, even under heavy usage. The mean time before failure (MTBF) is over 100 years. That’s good enough for most people. Our proprietary wear leveling and bad bit management algorithms extend the life of the drives. And best of all, you’ll never have to defrag an SSD. Are heat spreaders really all that necessary for memory modules anymore? It seems that with the module manufacturers going down to finer process nodes without memory speed going up dramatically, do they really produce enough heat to merit spreaders? Actually, DDR speeds are increasing much faster than operating voltages are decreasing. Manufacturing process improvements are helping, but still, our fastest new DDR3 modules do get hot. With high-speed DDR3 heat spreaders are more important now than ever before. What is your overall outlook for the memory industry? Do you expect a shakeup due to the thin margins most companies have to deal with? Or have we actually seen a lot of stabilization and will continue to have all of the current memory manufacturers with us in the near future? I wouldn’t be surprised to see some thinning of the ranks. Any well managed memory company should survive this year. But somebody always tries to outfox the market and stock up when prices “bottom out”. Such risks were rewarded only with pain this year. Is there anything else you would like to add that I haven’t covered with these questions? Super Talent has a very strong IP department, with over 200 patents awarded in Flash and DRAM technology. We expect a major shakeout in the Flash market as a result of the Sandisk lawsuit. Fortunately for us, our founder Abraham Ma had the vision to build a powerful patent portfolio early.
Some years back I had spoken with Joe when he worked at Tyan. If you are curious, here is his interview from 1999. It is rather interesting to see how things have panned out for the industry since that interview. Thanks again to Joe for taking time out to answer these questions!
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Copyright 1999-2007 PenStar Systems, LLC. |
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