History (1992): Digital Equipment Bringing Subject of SSDs Back to Style

Access time of SSDs is 50x faster than HDDs. It’s the Rolls-Royce in storage. Despite Digital Equipment Corp.’s (Shrewsbury, MA) efforts, it still costs the price of a Rolls.

The firm is vigorously in state with their beautiful golden putting RAM disks back into style cases, right in the middle of its large booth dedicated to its OEM mass storage group at Comdex/Fall’92.

They can replace a Winchester unit. Access time is down to 0.25ms, compared to 50x more on the most performing HDD. Transfer rate is almost 10x higher. And finally DEC states a rate of 800 I/Os.

The EPS510 and 530 models offer capacities of 107 to 267MB respectively.

They require no change in the OS because they are considered as ordinary HDDs connected via a SCSl-2 interface.

These SSDs are made of semiconductor memory modules, here 6 or 16 DRAMs.

All this is not completely new. For quite a while, Hitachi, NEC, StorageTek, and before Control Data via Imprimis and now Seagate, have been offering this type of high performance secondary memory on mainframes. You can even find them at EMC (Hopkinton, MA), Memorex (Santa Clara, CA), Newer Technology (Wichita, KS), Solid Computer (Norcross, GA), System Industries (Milpitas, CA) or Vermont Research (Leatherhead, Surrey, UK).

But this time, DEC, with its standard interface, is aiming the same application field, but on servers operated by smaller computers. The initial idea is to add on an extra level of ultra-fast external memories between the main computer and its magnetic disks for applications with critical answering time (systems for seat reservations, financial transactions, etc.).

But until now, this SSD market has remained tiny. For one simple reason: the price. DEC has made a special effort, by offering for $13,500 a 107MB evaluation unit available 1Q93, with production set up 6 months later.

“The quantity price will be even more aggressive,” we were told. It will have to. The usual ratio between OEM price and final price leads close to $35,000 for 107MB, 30x the price for the same capacity on a Winchester disk drive. Unlike EEPROM type flash memory, DRAMs in electronic disks lose their data when there is a power fail. That’s why they always have a security battery. And for even more safety, they have an extra disk, a Winchester one this time, to backup data.

It’s the first time that DEC is offering this type of product to an OEM market it has been ferociously flirting with since 1991.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠59, published on December 1992.