Micron to buy Elpida, DRAM market left with 3 competitors

Bloomberg brings news from Japan that U.S-based chipmakerMicron Technology will purchase Japanese rival Elpida. This falls in line with a statement made last month by CEO Mark Durcan that Micron would make the purchase, but only if it could avoid stock dilution and the acquisition of too much interest-bearing debt.

Micron is the last major U.S-based maker of memory chips, well known for its brand of Crucial memory and its solid entries into the SSD space. Elpida is a major supplier or memory chips for Apple.

Elpida filed for bankruptcy in February due a perfect storm of falling DRAM prices and Japan's increasingly strong currency, a combination which makes it difficult to export goods which are both profitable and competitively priced.

Micron is said to be paying about 140 billion yen -- or about 1.76 billion dollars -- just to shed a portion of Elpida's debt. The report also claims that Micron will also be investing about 100 billion yen in Elpida's facilities, a shot in the arm which should bolster its ability to crank out DRAM chips.

Micron's absorption of Elpida will leave the global DRAM market with only three competitors: Samsung, Hynix and Micron. Currently, Samsung owns about 41 percent of the market while Hynix comes in a distant second at 24 percent. Both Micron and Elpida weigh in around 12 percent each, meaning their combined total will essentially tie them with Hynix in terms of market volume.

apanese researchers showcase hybrid SSD using NAND and ReRAM

The technology inside that new solid state drive you just purchased could be obsolete sooner than you think. A group of Japanese researchers have developed ahybrid SSD that uses high-capacity NAND flash memory alongside Resistive Random Access Memory, or ReRAM. The combination could allow future drives to write up to eleven times faster than today’s quickest SSDs.

The research was led by Professor Ken Takeuchi from Chuo University and presented at the 2012 Symposium of VLSI Circuits held in Hawaii. At the event, the group proposed a drive that included 256GB of NAND flash as well as 8 Gbits of ReRAM, the latter of which is used as cache and storage.

In addition to the increased speeds, researchers claim the hybrid drive will reduce power consumption by up to 93 percent. And if that isn’t enough to get you excited, these drives could last far longer than traditional SSDs – nearly seven times longer, to be exact. ReRAM, however, is currently expensive but the price versus longevity factor could reduce overall costs to just 1/7 of today’s drives.

Life of the drive is also extended by reducing the number of writes in the NAND flash. Instead, data is written in the ReRAM about 30 times more often than in NAND flash.

An algorithm called MRU (most recently used) is used to store frequently used data in the ReRAM. By using this method, common data can be read from the drive faster than from NAND flash.

Despite its promise, Neowin concludes that we aren’t likely to see this technology come to consumer-level SSDs anytime soon. The reason for this has to do with the price of ReRAM. If the researchers can significantly lower the overall price (none was mentioned) then things could become much more feasible.

Intel adding TRIM support for SSDs in RAID 0 with RST 11.5

Windows 7 and Intel's RST (Rapid Storage Technology) have supported TRIM for quite a while, but this support has always excluded solid-state drives in RAID configurations. Fortunately for owners of multiple SSDs who want to put all their precious GBs to use that may change soon, as the TRIM feature will reportedly be enabled for RAID 0 setups in an upcoming RST 11.5 driver release.

Currently the only way for TRIM to function on an SSD is to operate in AHCI mode. Last year users were led to believe that the Intel RST 9.6 drivers would add TRIM support in RAID volumes, but Intel later clarified that it was only for SSDs acting as single drives in AHCI mode alongside a separate array attached to the same Intel storage controller -- but not if the SSD was part of a RAID volume.

The benefits of TRIM are obvious because the write performance of an SSD significantly degrades with time or as the drive fills out without a feature to properly handle garbage collection overhead. This means that SSDs in high-performance RAID 0 arrays could eventually see the increased read/write speeds neglected.

Intel RST 11.5 is not expected to arrive until sometime in Q2 2012 with support for Windows 7 and Windows 8 systems. For a more detailed explanation on TRIM, take a look at AnandTech's SSD Anthology article.

Corsair, A-Data launch new SandForce-powered SSDs

Corsair has launched its third-generation Force solid-state drives, delivering SATA 6Gb/s speeds to value-minded consumers. Powered by the same SandForce SF-2281 controller as OCZ's Vertex 3, the Force Series 3 can reportedly hit speeds of up to 550MB/s sequential reads and 520MB/s writes, with up to 85,000 IOPS during 4KB random writes. By comparison, the original Force drives peaked at 280MB/s and 50,000 IOPs. The Vertex 3 240GB lists the same maximum transfer rates as the Force 3, except it supposedly offers 15,000 less IOPS.

Despite claiming similar performance to the Vertex 3 (which most would consider to be today's quickest consumer SSD), Corsair is pushing its latest drives with incredibly aggressive pricing. The 60GB is set at $139, the 120GB costs only $219 while the 240GB is $499 -- all of which are bundled with a 3.5-inch adapter and backed with a three-year warranty. As of writing, the 120GB Vertex 3 is going for $299.99 at Newegg, while the 240GB is $529.99. The Force Series 3 will launch worldwide this month, so keep your eyes peeled for a review.

A-Data revealed its latest contribution to the flash market alongside Corsair's announcement today. Unsurprisingly, the company's new S511 also employs an SF-2200 processor, and we wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it were an SF-2281. A-Data's lineup also consists of 60GB, 120GB and 240GB models with a peak throughput of 550MB/s reads and 520MB/s writes, along with 60,000 IOPS during 4KB random writes. They'll also come with a 3.5-inch adapter and are priced roughly equivalent to the Vertex 3 based on euro to USD conversions.

LSI MegaRAID 9260-8i 6G Review – 2.5GB/s Speed Through 8 SSDs

Hot on the table in our labs today is the LSI 9260-8I MegaRAID 6Gb/s SATA+SAS internal RAID card and it happens to be sitting beside 8 Crucial C300 SATA 3 SSDs and 8 OWC Mercury Extreme Pro RE SSDs.

We are going to put this card through its paces and brace yourself because we have been pulling off amazing speeds as high as 2.5GB/s and 1.7GB/s for high sequential read and write access.

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As amazing as this review is, in that we don’t really get the chance to test any piece of technology with 8 SSDs of each SATA interface every day, we have to let you know right off its just a teaser. Our follow up review will be an exclusive review of the newly released to be released LSI MegaRAID 9265-8i MegaRAID Card which is capable of 2.7GB/s read and 3.3GB/s write access with an amazing 465, 000 IOPS.

INTRODUCTION

The LSI 9260-8i MegaRAID card is a SATA 3 internal RAID card that allows us to connect up to 8 hard drives (or in our case SSDs) in a variety of multi-level RAID configurations to include RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50 and 60. It installs through a quick clip into your motherboard PCIe 2.0 x8 slot and, as we saw with this card, is recognized immediately.

This value of this card becomes more apparent as we move into the world of solid state drives and higher storage speeds, the same speeds that become bottle-necked at around the 600MB/s mark through use of Intel ICH10 RAID configurations. The ability of this card to bring us into speeds in excess of the 2GB/s mark, not only lets us push bar when it comes to our system performance, but also opens the door to any number of possibilities in the enterprise world.

Take a quick peak at this video which demonstrates the use of the 9260-81 in ‘The Dark Energy Survey’ which tries to tackle one of todays greatest scientific mysteries, why the acceleration of the univers seems to be speeding up.

PHYSICAL COMPOSITION

At the heart of the LSI 9260, is the 800MHz PowerPC LSISAS2108 ROC which is located beneath the silver heat sink and is the sole reason they can advertise amazing speeds of 2.8GB/s read and 1.8GB/s write access speeds for the unit. To the left of this are two SFF 8087 mini- SAS connectors which, as we will see, allow for the connection of 8 SSDs through LSIs SAS to SATA connectors. On the right, there are 5 modules of Micron flash which provide for the 512mb of on board cache and there is a connector for the battery backup unit which can provide the card with enough power to preserve data for 72 hours. Last but not least, there is a sound alarm which is located lower left of the RAM.

There is not really much of interesting the rear except for the PCIe 2.0 x8 which also works in 4 or 16 powered slots.

FEATURES

• Eight internal SATA+SAS ports
• Two mini-SAS SFF-8087 x4 connectors
• 6Gb/s throughput per port
• LSISAS2108 RAID-on-Chip (ROC)
• Low-profile MD2 form factor
• x8 PCI Express 2.0 host interface
• 512MB DDRII cache (800MHz)
• Optional battery backup unit (direct attach)
• Connect up to 128 SATA and/or SAS devices
• RAID levels 0, 1, 5 and 6
• RAID spans 10, 50 and 60

BENEFITS

• Superior performance
  o Maximum reads: 2,875MB/s
  o Maximum writes: 1,850MB/s
• PCI Express 2.0 provides faster signaling for high-bandwidth applications
• Support for 3Gb/s and 6Gb/s SATA and SAS hard drives for maximum inside-the-box flexibility
• SafeStore Encryption Services for more secure data protection
• Low-profile MD2 form factor for space-limited 1U and 2U environments