14 DAY TRIAL // With solid state drives growing in popularity, and flash storage as a whole getting adopted more openly, the JEDEC Solid State Technology Association decided to work on new standards for models beyond existing disk drive form factors.
When speaking of SSDs, one automatically thinks of 3.5-inch, 2.5-inch and even 1.8-inch products that, on the outside at least, look just like HDDs.
These form factors have, so far, served them well when it came to personal computers and enterprise applications.
Still, as proven by PCI Express SSDs, leaving the norm, shape-wise, sometimes allows for a better performance and higher capacity.
As such, JEDEC decided it was time to come up with new standards that could extend the usability to solid state storage, to such areas as smaller consumer devices.
Mostly, the association will keep improving on the existing strengths of the units, those being speed and a small environment footprint (energy efficiency).
The general hope is for whatever standards are developed to see at least the same level of success as JESD218 and JESD219.
“Momentum for adoption of embedded SSDs continues to grow and with the right OEM support, Gartner believes that embedded SSDs could potentially out ship traditional SSD form factor usage in mobile PCs by 2013,” according to Joseph Unsworth, Research Director at Gartner.
“Deploying the first generation of SSDs in disk drive form factors leveraged the existing ecosystem and helped ensure supply chain flexibility,” said Mian Quddus, JEDEC Board of Directors Chairman. He added,
“But with tablet PCs and ultra-thin portable notebooks emerging in Client as well as high-density Enterprise systems, there is a growing demand for SSDs in smaller form factors and an urgent need for related industry standards.”
“I strongly urge all interested companies to participate in the development of solid state drive standards within JEDEC,” Quddus concluded.