JEDEC Published SSD Standards

JEDEC Solid State Technology Association, in the development of standards for the microelectronics industry, announced the publication of two anticipated standards for solid state drives: JESD218 Solid-State Drive (SSD) Requirements and Endurance Test Method and JESD219 Solid-State Drive Endurance Workloads. Both documents are available for free.
 
In order to facilitate understanding and faster adoption of the new standards, JEDEC is presenting an tutorial on SSDs in San Jose, CA on October 5, 2010. The event will be facilitated by Alvin Cox, Chairman JC-64.8 and Senior Engineer, Seagate and Steffen Hellmold, VP Business Development with SandForce.
 
As the data storage market demands faster, more energy efficient solutions in a smaller footprint, solid state drives (SSDs) offer the promise of higher performance, reduced power consumption, and reduced space requirements – with continuing improvements over time. In order to fulfill this potential, widely adopted industry standards for SSDs are seen as essential tools to reduce market confusion, facilitate broad adoption and alleviate product quality and reliability concerns.
 
"To achieve the goal of consensus-based industry standards for SSDs, JEDEC’s JC-64.8 Subcommittee for Solid State Drives has taken the lead to provide meaningful, real-life, endurance and reliability metrics to better enable customers to select the right SSD for their expected applications and workloads," said Alvin Cox, Chairman JC-64.8 and Senior Engineer, Seagate Technology. He added: "In developing these standards, JC-64.8 collaborated with numerous other industry groups and standards associations and coordinated SSD-related changes needed in other existing standards to meet industry needs."
 
Application Classes
For each class of SSDs defined in the standard, JESD218 Solid-State Drive Requirements and Endurance Test Method defines conditions of use and corresponding endurance verification requirements. As SSDs are subject to different levels of demand depending on the applications in use, the standard defines two application classes: Client and Enterprise. It further establishes specific requirements for each, an approach intended to help consumers and enterprise IT managers choose products that are the best fit for their needs.
 
Endurance Rating and Verification
JESD218 also creates an SSD Endurance Rating that represents the number of terabytes written by a host to the SSD (TBW), which provides a standard comparison for SSDs based on application class. A standard endurance rating will be a welcome change for end users seeking to compare SSDs from different manufacturers. In addition, the standard establishes two approaches – direct verification and extrapolation – for endurance and retention verification.
 
Workload
Since workloads are expected to change as applications evolve, they are described in a separate, complementary standard: JESD219 Solid-State Drive Endurance Workloads. Because the workload that a SSD is subjected to has a significant impact on the amount of data that may be written to the drive, a standard workload is required to have comparable results. At the present time JESD219 defines workloads for enterprise applications only; client workloads will be added in the near future.
 
"Standards play a critical role in technology adoption and proliferation, and we are glad to have participated in development of the JEDEC SSD standards. The comprehensive approach taken to defining capacity, workload and endurance will go a long way towards enabling market confidence in SSDs," said Scott Graham, Vice-Chairman JC-64.8 and Technology Strategy Manager, Micron Technology.
 
"Solid State Drives will change the system architecture for compute applications due to their disruptive value proposition in Enterprise and Client Compute Applications," added Steffen Hellmold, VP Business Development at SandForce. "JEDEC has taken a leadership role to bring the industry together to enable broad market adoption of SSDs through industry standards with the announced standards representing a significant milestone."