Adampak

[Drizzt]

They are basically like a 3M extention compared to Bradly which is vertically integrated. Their risk is more if they lose Seagate and Western Digital or if this 2 lose out in the SSD front.

According to storage search Western Digital rank pretty high up. Adampak's opportunity to grow is limited unless they can convince Samsung or Sandisk to make use of their services.

[kazukirai]

He must be a joker to suggest Tablets increase at expense of labtop/pc. Tablets cannot replace a labtop or pc. The threat should be labtop increasingly are using fdd instead of hdd.

To be fair, Apurva wrote, "If the demand for tablets increases at the expense of notebooks/netbooks..." so it's more of Tablets replacing Laptops/Netbooks rather than Laptops/PCs.

I think Netbooks dying off is a certainty due to tablets and Ultrabooks. I saw a chart based on unit sales figures of Tablets vs. Netbooks and the two look highly negatively correlated.

I saw the DMG comment too that hkl kindly reproduced here. I'm just wondering how true is it; is it opinion or fact that SSDs have similar labelling requirements as HDDs?

As for obtaining new customers, I think the management team (which has done a fantastic job so far) would be working on that.

(vested)

[Drizzt]

they may not bring over all labelling requirements (i have to open up my bro's spoilt hard disk to know!) but the main label should be largely the same i feel.

[dydx]

Never under-estimate how and to what extent a smart, competent, rational, experienced and driven management - which is rare! - can grow and transform a business over time, especially if the business is engaged in an industry with longer term growth potential. Such a management should be able to deliver recurrent earnings from the business, as well as recurrent cash returns by way of dividends to its shareholders, together with raising or enhancing the intrinsic value of the business over time.

Usually, a business with the above positive characteristics will end up being acquired by a player in the same or related trade, or buy other investors - including institutional funds - going for quality business and steady cash returns over the longer term.

[hkl]

Where labels are concerned, i think it is not a big problem for adampak to continue to supply these to Seagate and WD whether it is HDD or SSD. but for seals and die cuts, will these still be needed in the future for SSDs? The annual report does not specify the breakdown for sales to the HDD sector between labels and die cuts and seals.

Management reported that the HDD sector took up 52.2% of total sales in 2010. If we assume that the breakdown is about the same as their product breakdown, i.e. 60% labels, 40% die cuts, and HDD technology suddenly gets phased out tomorrow (hence no need for die cuts and seals anymore), the hit to Adampak would be 20-30% of their total sales, a significant hit but the business would still be more than intact.

My understanding is that this is a quality company with a quality management, with a great dividend and fantastic cost control measures to boot, but also a business that is not going to experience a sudden spurt in earnings growth.

Just my 2 cents worth.

[Drizzt]

SSDs have a 'bleak' future, researchers say

Computerworld - SAN JOSE -- As the circuitry of NAND flash-based, solid-state drives shrinks, performance drops precipitously -- meaning the technology could be doomed, according to new research.

Speaking to about 500 attendees at the 10th Usenix Conference on File and Storage Technologies here this week, Laura Grupp, a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego, said that as NAND flash densities increase, so do issues such as read and write latency and data errors.

While the density of SSDs grows and the cost per gigabyte shrinks, "everything else about them is poised to get worse," Grupp said.

"This makes the future of SSDs cloudy: While the growing capacity of SSDs and high IOP rates will make them attractive for many applications, the reduction in performance that is necessary to increase capacity while keeping costs in check may make it difficult for SSDs to scale as a viable technology for some applications," Grupp, lead author of the study, wrote in a research paper.

Grupp, along with Steven Swanson, director of UCSD's Non-Volatile Systems Laboratory, and John Davis of Microsoft Research, tested 45 different NAND flash chips that ranged in size from 72 nanometer (nm) circuitry to today's 25nm technology. The chips came from six vendors.

The tests revealed that the program speed (write speed) for pages in a flash block suffered dramatic and predictable variations in latency. And, as the NAND flash wore out, error rates also varied widely between devices. Single-level cell (SLC) NAND held up the best in the tests, while multi-level cell (MLC), and in particular, triple-level cell (TLC) NAND, produced the worst results.

The researchers took their empirical results and extrapolated them to the year 2024, when NAND flash development road maps show flash circuitry is expected to be only 6.5nm in size. At that time, read/write latency is expected to double in MLC flash and increase more than 2.5 times for TLC flash.

In addition, bit error rates increased by a factor of more than three, according to the researchers. "We can either have capacity or performance," Grupp said.

The researchers used PCIe-based flash cards with a channel speed of 400MBps based on the Open NAND Flash Interface (ONFI) specification and a standard 96 NAND flash dies, which is typical of SSDs.

The researchers did not use specialized NAND flash controllers as are used by SSD vendors such as Intel, OCZ or Fusion-io. Instead their results were baseline and considered "optimistic" because they didn't include latency added through error correction or garbage collection algorithms.

Because SSDs have no moving parts, the time needed to write and read data is more than 100 times faster than that of hard disk drives that use read-write heads on actuator arms to find data on a spinning platter. But as NAND flash circuitry continues to shrink in size, the performance gap with hard disk drives will become more narrow, Grupp said.

By the time NAND flash shrinks from 25nm today to 6.5nm in 2024, SSDs based on TLC flash will sport as much as 16TB of capacity and MLC flash SSDs will have 4TB, Grupp said.

Considering the diminishing returns on performance versus capacity, Grupp said, "it's not going to be viable to go past 6.5nm ... 2024 is the end."

However, even with TLC flash at 6.5nm, Grupp calculates that SSDs will continue to outperform hard disk drives on throughput, 32,000 IOPS to 200 IOPS, respectively.

Some background
NAND flash memory chips are used to build solid-state drives (flash storage in a hard drive form factor) and PCIe-based flash cards. Over the past six years or so, the transistor size of NAND flash chips has shrunk from 72nm to 25nm, which allows more data to be stored with the same number of flash dies.

But as the size of the circuitry diminishes, so do the walls of cells that hold the electrons, which in turn represent bits of data. As cell walls thin out, electrons leak through and create data errors, which requires additional error correction code.

The first SSDs only stored 1 bit of data per NAND flash cell, which is known as SLC flash. Next came MLC flash, which offered two bits per cell. Most recently, vendors have begun producing triple-level cell (TLC) flash, which stores three bits of data per cell. The most common NAND flash remains MLC, but that's expected to change as vendors strive to produce higher capacity SSDs in order to compete with hard disk drive capacities.

Flash memory, however, wears out over time as data is marked for deletion and moved and new data is written in a process known as a program-erase cycle (P/E cycle). Special firmware in today's drive controllers more evenly spreads data throughout the drive to give the media greater endurance, but ultimately, NAND flash has a finite number of P/E cycles.


Read and write MBps (bandwidth) decreases with density and capacity. (Source: UCSD Department of Computer Science and Engineering)
SLC flash has the highest reliability and resiliency, with 50,000 to 100,000 program/erase (P/E) cycles. MLC NAND can sustain 5,000 to 10,000 erase cycles. TLC NAND has the lowest endurance, with 1,000 P/E cycles to as few as 500 P/E cycles, the researchers found.

"It's a pretty dramatic decline," Grupp said. "[People] are used to working with technology that continues to just get better, but with NAND flash we're going to be facing trade-offs as it evolves."

Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian, or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed . His email address is lmearian@computerworld.com.

[freedom]

The researchers took their empirical results and extrapolated them to the year 2024, when NAND flash development road maps show flash circuitry is expected to be only 6.5nm in size. At that time, read/write latency is expected to double in MLC flash and increase more than 2.5 times for TLC flash.

Because SSDs have no moving parts, the time needed to write and read data is more than 100 times faster than that of hard disk drives that use read-write heads on actuator arms to find data on a spinning platter. But as NAND flash circuitry continues to shrink in size, the performance gap with hard disk drives will become more narrow, Grupp said.

However, even with TLC flash at 6.5nm, Grupp calculates that SSDs will continue to outperform hard disk drives on throughput, 32,000 IOPS to 200 IOPS, respectively.

double or 2.5 times vs 100 times

32,000 IOPS vs 200 IOPS

SSD might not be the final winner, but at least it seems that SSD beats HDD hands down.

[Drizzt]

u gotta install one to know. some crazy read writes there. but they get killed faster as well.

[bluechipstamp]

SSDs have a 'bleak' future, researchers say

This should read:

NAND-based SSDs have a 'bleak' future, researchers say.

I've read that Phase-change memory based SSD's can overcome the problem.

[freedom]

u gotta install one to know. some crazy read writes there. but they get killed faster as well.

that's common.

a candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long.

researchers mostly concern about theoretical limit. As an consumer, I did not find SSD lifespan that short.