Solid State Drives have entered the market and are capturing market share not only in the desktop segment but also in the enterprise market. This is true especially in data centers where access latencies, reliability and power consumption easily offset the initial cost overhead.

The predominant SSD storage medium at this moment is NAND flash memory and this is not likely to change in the near future even though new technologies such as phase change memory, magnetoresistive memory, resistive memory, organic memory, nanotube-based memory and finally NOR flash are on the horizon. NAND flash memory has some peculiarities; some of them are making it the media of choice in the current technology landscape, others, though, are posing some severe limitations with respect to the applicability of NAND flash as a drop-in replacement for rotatable media, at least for those unaware of the possible pitfalls.

In the first installment of this series, we'll take another technology deep dive into NAND technology and in the following articles apply the insights into the NAND idiosyncrasies to Solid State Drive management in order to optimize performance, minimize wear, and most importantly, maintain performance over the live of an ageing drive.

Minireview

In a world increasingly ruled by energy and greenhouse effect concerns, power consumption of electronics is becoming an important factor in the overall acceptance of the product. Clearly, an 800W audio system will not be expected to draw a meek 50W but a component as small and humble as the processor in a personal computer is. This is where AMD's current desktop flagship CPU, also known as the Deneb core-based Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition has taken quite a bit of flak over the past few months. Whereas every other AMD processor is rated at or below 125W TDP, the '965 Black Edition with its unlocked multipliers for core and North Bridge has been rated at 140W, enough to raise more than one eyebrow in the evermore energy conscious world. From a misconceptual point of view, the biggest issue is that TDP does not mean that the processor will actually draw that much power, rather the TDP acronym has undergone so many permutations that it is no longer really clear what it stands for. To sync everybody back to the same page, it is the thermal design power, that is the power requirement that has to be met by the voltage regulator module and the heatsink in order to warrant save operation of the CPU under any and all conditions - as long as they are reasonable.

With the samples we had in our test labs, we never got even close to the 140W, in fact, we struggled to hit the 110W benchmark even if power was measured before the VRM which, given an efficacy in the order of 75-80% translates into maximum CPU power in the area of some 90W. It is self-understood that there have to be margins, especially when dealing with Taiwanese or Chinese motherboard manufacturers, at the same time, that 140W number has made the rounds and not helped AMD's reputation for power efficiency.

Reason enough to introduce a new revision of the Phenom II with a few small but nonetheless important differences under the metal layers.

Toys are for playing! Like nothing else, computer hardware has become one of the favorites for playing and we are not talking computer games here. Rather, it is pushing things to the limit, until they break or, hopefully, recover with the next reboot. For all practice-oriented matters, the hunt for extreme performance also known as insane overclocking has no real bearing, it requires extreme cooling and voltages that would melt down any IC in stock configuration. As soon as everything is in place, the PC turns into a hissing monster that can be substituted for a space heater but mama … that’s where the fun is.

In our last article we were looking at ASUS implementation of AMD’s RADEON HD 5850 including some cautious forays into Smart Doctor and overclocking but at 1.15V, the highest setting that was stable was around 850 MHz core and 4400 Mbps for the memory. Well, we didn’t want to fry the card on the first week. However, we got curious and started playing around some more with the utility just to see how far we could go on air, that is, without changing any of the physical cooling attributes and relying entirely on the configuration utility, in this case, Smart Doctor.

Do you like bold? Bold is beautiful, especially in the case of bold styling. A red and black Dodge Challenger is beautiful because its styling is bold and because it has a lot of power under the hood. There is an interesting parallel between the styling of graphics cards and the styling of automobiles. Three years ago, everybody displayed their heat pipes and the more surfaces and convolutions there were, the better the product had to be. The tables have turned, though, it is the confidence of a winner that dictates a rather sober styling of graphics cards now. In the case of today’s contender, that is, ASUS’ RADEON EAH 5850, it is about as simple as it is understatedly yet decidedly bold.

To give credit where credit is due, the reference design was done by ATI and all current cards are following it. Notwithstanding, there are differences between manufacturers, primarily with respect to features, warranty and some of the bundled software. ASUS advertises the EAH5850 to be equipped with their “voltage tweak” technology, enabled in software through the “smart doctor” utility, which also allows independent overclocking of core and memory. To ensure that everybody feels safe about these features, ASUS backs its products with a three year warranty. Similar to XFX, Sapphire and HIS, ASUS also includes a coupon for a complimentary copy of Colin McRae Dirt2, to be released on December 11, 2009 through Steam.

Mountain View, California-based Rambus, Inc. is a company name, the mere mentioning of which still sends shivers down the spine of many a seasoned JEDEC memory warrior. The saga about Rambus’ involvement in JEDEC, its exodus from the standards organization and allegations of fraudulent behavior is too convoluted to even scratch the surface, even though at one point we, that is LostCircuits, were inadvertently suckered into what has made history as the “Rambus Wars”. Suffice it to say that history is generally written by the winners and in this case, there are no clear winners, therefore, there is no clear story either. There was dirty fighting on both sides and unfortunately, those who were left holding the bag were not the ones who created all the mess to begin with. As so often, however, good things can come out of anything, in this case some excellent relationships with several Rambus employees who were kind enough to explain the latest technology stint from the “baddest boys in the memory business”.

Enter Threaded DDR3 Modules