Asia manufacturer announce open-channel firmware based SSDs

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Shannon Systems has announced its open-channel SSDs at Flash Memory Summit. For open-channel SSDs the firmware of the drive only performs some rudimentary basic tasks, the rest is handled by the NVMe driver of the operating system.



Open-channel drives are either in the U.2 or PCIe card form-factor and only handle some basic flash operations. Wear leveling, error handling and S.M.A.R.T health management is performed by the controller chip in the drive, the rest of the operations, such as garbage collection and assigning logical addresses to flash cells are handled by the NVMe driver of the OS, noticed myce; Open-channel SSDs have several benefits. E.g they reduce overhead and allow applications to tell the drive how much performance they need, after which the drive will split up the available resources. Also, storage space and processing resources can be distributed amongst multiple users or applications. It also allows the SSD to utilize both the CPU and RAM memory of the host computer instead of being limited by the processing power of the SSD controller. 


 

Open Channel SSD-AIC

Open Channel SSD-U.2

Capacity

6400/7680GB

960/1920/3840GB

6400/7680GB

Flash NAND

 3D TLC

128K Sequential Read

Up to 6GB/s

Up to 3.5GB/s

Up to 3.5GB/s

128K Sequential Write

Up to 2.8GB/s

Up to 2.8GB/s

Up to 2.8GB/s

4KB Random Read IOPS

Up to 1000K

Up to 800K

Up to 800K

4KB Random Write IOPS

180K (SS)

140K (SS)

180K (SS)

4KB Random Read Latency

80~90us

80~90us

80~90us

4KB Random Write Latency

15~18us

15~18us

15~18us

Endurance

0.9~1.8 DWPD for 5 years

0.9~1.8 DWPD for 5 years

0.9~1.8 DWPD for 5 years

Form factor

HL-FH PCIe

2.5-inch

Interface

PCIe 3.0 x 8

PCIe 3.0 x 4


Shannon Systems currently lists two open-channels SSDs on its website. One PCIe card and one U.2 SSD that are both available in capacities up to 7.6TB. The PCIe card should be able to achieve sequential reads of up to 1,000,000 IOPS. The U.2 drive should be able to perform random reads at a maximum of 800,000. Random writes are with 180,000 and 140,000 significantly slower.

Open-channel SSDs can be used with Linux through the LightNVM project. Microsoft recently also announcedsupport for open-channel SSDs.

Shannon Systems also announced that its open-channel drives are already in use by Chinese online retail giant Alibaba.

Asia manufacturer announce open-channel firmware based SSDs


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