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Short summary:
From now on, all SiliconDrive™ products of the Californian manufacturer
SiliconSystems come equipped with the new SiSMART™.
This new patent
pending technology monitors the write/erase cycles of the flash cells in
the cards and drives. This way it is possible to predict the remaining
life span of the products and to plan the future usage.
Press release:
SiliconSystems, Inc., the world leader in storage technology engineered
exclusively for the enterprise system OEM market, today announced a breakthrough
storage system monitoring and usage technology called SiSMART™.
This
new, patent-pending technology accurately monitors storage system usage
to predict useable life, and is incorporated into the company’s entire
SiliconDrive™ product line.
By monitoring read/write activity, SiSMART
technology provides users of solid-state storage systems a level of
confidence and accuracy about the viability of their storage solutions
previously
unobtainable.
SiSMART technology constantly monitors and reports the exact amount
of storage system useable life available allowing users to make any
necessary
adjustments or schedule preventative maintenance to ensure system
availability and data integrity.
SiSMART technology is ideal for enterprise
system
OEM applications in the netcom, military, industrial, interactive
kiosk and
medical markets.
“Solid-state storage technology offers major benefits over rotating
disk drives, such as added security and unmatched ruggedness, but until
now there were valid concerns about the inability to accurately predict
storage system lifespan,” said Michael Hajeck, CEO at SiliconSystems. “After
receiving overwhelmingly positive feedback from some of our most demanding
tier-one customers regarding the accuracy and dependability of our SiSMART
technology, we decided to include this breakthrough technology in our complete
line of SiliconDrive products.”
Solid-state drive lifespan is becoming a topic of concern among analysts,
according to Gartner Senior Analyst Joseph Unsworth. “There is a
strong need in the market for a means to track drive usage and make more
accurate predictions concerning lifespan. Technology that enables customers
to have the ability to set their own parameters and anticipate when problems
will arise with their drives will be attractive in order to manage risk.”
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Rotating hard disk drives employ Self Monitoring and Reporting Technology (SMART),
which was designed to act as an early warning system for pending problems
with mechanical media.
Though this technology is useful for monitoring wear
on rotating hard disk drives, it cannot be used to monitor the useful
life of a solid-state drive. Since solid-state storage products have no moving
parts many of the parameters monitored by the SMART function are not
applicable.
Solid-state storage components, which are the fundamental building blocks
of every solid-state drive, can lose the ability to retain programmed
data after
hundreds of thousands to millions of write/erase cycles. With no method
to determine or predict when write/erase cycle endurance will be exceeded,
a solid-state
storage product is typically allowed to operate until it ultimately fails,
leading to unscheduled system down times and significant data loss.
In contrast to SMART, SiSMART monitors how many write/erase cycles
have occurred on a solid-state storage system – the only real failure mechanism
present
in solid-state storage.
By incorporating a patent-pending algorithm
that tracks all data transactions internally in the SiliconDrive, SiSMART
is able to accurately
monitor and report storage system usage to the host system.
This enables
users to model future usage, set thresholds to perform maintenance
and adjust data
collection requirements to match the required life of the deployed
equipment.
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