We need standards for SSDs

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) recently announced that it has formed a Solid State Storage Initiative (see SNIA launches SSD initiative). In addition to the SNIA's normal activities such as evangelizing, proselytizing and cheerleading, the SSSI will contribute to standards relating to solid-state disk (SSD) drives.

What we really need here from the SNIA are standards that users, integrators and OEMs can use to compare SSDs, as well as SSDs vs. traditional hard disk drives (HDDs). At a minimum, this standard, or standards, would address performance, providing apples-to-apples metrics to enable comparisons of vendors' performance claims.

But in the case of SSDs, the metrics would have to go way beyond that. For one, they would have to include capacity and price. This would approximate what we get from the Storage Performance Council's SPC benchmarks.

However, the SSD metrics should also encompass durability/reliability and even power consumption. I doubt that it would be possible to come up with a single metric that measured IOPS/$/GB/watts, but the industry will desperately need at least a series of metrics to enable users/integrators/OEMs to make sense out of the nonsense that currently dominates in marketing materials.