Micron promises supercharged 1 GB/s SSD

By Wolfgang Gruener

Chicago (IL) – Chip manufacturer has demonstrated what is, at least to our knowledge, the fastest solid state disk drive (SSD) demonstrated so far. A demo unit shown in a blurry YouTube video was hitting data transfer rates of 800 MB/s and can expand to apparently about 1 GB/s. The IO performance is about twice of the best performance we have seen to date.

Ok, we have not actually seen the exact numbers, since the YouTube video is too blurry, but if we believe the claims made my Micron staffers, then we might see a dramatic increase in SSD performance in the not too distant future.

Posted on Micron’s new blog, the video showcases a 2-processor, eight-core Intel Xeon PC with two SSDs The difference to your average SSD is that these drives are not connected via a PATA or SATA interface and therefore are not limited to the bandwidth limit of 300 MB/s of SATA II. Instead, the drives have PCIe interfaces and, according to Micron, include flash data management enhancements.

During the short demonstration, Micron’s Joe Jeddeloh claims that the two cards hit a data throughput of about 800 MB/s and about 150,000 to 160,000 random IOPS. He also showed a flash PCIe card that combined the two cards in one device with 16 flash channels. This card will be hitting a bandwidth of 1 GB/s and “at least 200,000 IOPS,” he said. For comparison reasons, the fastest enterprise SSDs available from big manufacturers today hit about 250 MB/s and about 30,000 IOPS.

The fastest hard drive you can buy today, WD’s Velociraptor, clocks in at about 100 MB/s.

The PCIe concept of SSDs has been shown before, most notably by Fusion IO, which hit about 100,000 IOPS about a year ago. The company recently announced a “consumer version” of its PCIe card, which will offer data throughput of 500 – 700 MB/s and about 50,000 IOPS for about $1000.

We have no idea what the Micron drive will cost, but it does not look cheap. Jeddeloh noted that the 1 GB/s drive will be available “soon”.

Original here