Thursday, November 27th 2008
Micron Demos PCI-e Solid State Prototype Capable of 1GB/s Read Speed
Yes, the title says it right. I just saw a YouTube video taken from Micron' headquarters, where the company's Joe Jeddeloh demonstrates the rough power of solid state technology. During the footage he demonstrates a prototype of comething called Washington solid state drive mounted on a PCI-E card that delivers read speeds of over 1GB/sec. Now we all know that these drives won't come in a month time, but they show how good the SSD technology really is. Maybe, this experiment also gives a hint how desperately we need a new SATA standard, current SATA 3Gbps drives no matter conventional or SSD can output only 300MB/s in theory. Back to the video, there two SSD PCI-E cards are running on a 2GHz eight-core Xeon system. Benchmarks of this configuration show output of 200,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second). Although, you can't actually read these numbers because of the video's low resolution, Jeddeloh says that one PCI-E drive can read at around 800MB/sec, while a pair of cards can read at 1GB/sec. Micron claims that there's nothing special about the flash memory the drives use, in fact these are ordinary SLC (single level cell) drives. They're only "managed correctly." At the end of the video, Jeddeloh also shows a single 8x PCI-E card that features two SSDs on a single board, that he claims also offer "at least" 1GB/sec of bandwidth. Micron plans "wide availability of the product in 2010, but that its going to be targeted at enterprise customers first." For now this is only a quick look in the future. Watch the video over at Micron's Advanced Storage Blog.
Source:
Micron
7 Comments on Micron Demos PCI-e Solid State Prototype Capable of 1GB/s Read Speed
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Goodbye loading screen =D
Guys - this drive is already out on the market!! It's the Fusion iodrive fusionio.com/PDFs/Fusion%20Specsheet.pdf with 700MBs read, 600MBs write, 100,000+ IOPS, 0.05 ms access latency, 48 years life expenctency (assuming 5TB of write erases per day on 160GB drive), all in a PCIex4 package. Fusionio has already said you can raid these cards together, which would give you north of 1GBs read/write and 200,000+IOPS. In fact IBM recently put put together a 4TB virtual array using these drives and acheived over 1,000,000 IOPS www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/storagevirtualization?entry=1m_iops_from_flash_actions. To put that in perspective the Velociraptor drives get 110MBs read, 100 MBs write, 130 IOPs, and 5.5 ms access latency. Fusionio's target market is the enterprise sector and it's priced the iodrive at ~$3k for 80GB.
If you research the iodrive you'll find out that Fusionio came up with the proprietary design and firmware. They turned to Micron to manufacture it at their IM Flash Technologies plant (a joint venture between Micron and Intel) near Salt Lake City, Utah (which is also where Fusioio is headquartered). This is the same plant that manufactures Intel's new SSD. So I suspect Micron is just re-branding some iodrives that it manufactures for Fusionio.
Now if you've been following this company's products, like I have, you'll know they announced the ioextreme, targeted at enthusiasts and gamers and released in Q1 2009 hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1352703. They're promising a bootable 80GB PCIex4 SSD with 500-700MBs read/write, 0.05ms access latency, all for under $1000 :rockout: That should really raise the bar for SSD in 2009!!
:toast: