We were invited to speak on two panels at this year's 2011 Flash Memory Summit. Now that the conference is over, we wanted to circle back with some thoughts on what we saw and provide an explanation as to why we test SSDs the way that we do.

The Flash Memory Summit, which was in Santa Clara from August 9^th-11^th, isn’t the sort of event that we usually attend because it’s a place for manufacturers to discuss design and development. Personally, I always find these conferences fascinating, but if you were there, you had to expect workshops filled with engineers and product managers delving into technical minutia. This would basically be cruel and unusual punishment for anyone who used to fall asleep in the back of Physics 101 (Ed.: it was Physics 1A at UCLA, and yes, I did).

That’s why we tend to report from trade shows like Computex and CES. Those are the consumer-oriented events where we get to present the efforts of all of that engineering work. Flash storage is really starting to take center stage, though. So, for the first time, we were invited to speak on two different panels at this year's 2011 Flash Memory Summit, covering benchmarking and SSD adoption.

The conference wanted someone to pass along the perspectives of consumer and enterprise end users. Of course, if you follow us on Facebook, none of this should come as a surprise. We've been peppering the page with polls on SSD technology to make sure we were best representing your thoughts during the conference. 

With the show now over, we wanted to share some of what we heard from the manufacturing side and provide our own responses.