BitMicro unveils 1.6TB solid state disk drive

TechWorld.com - BitMicro Networks Inc. has announced a flash memory-based solid state drive (SSD) with wide-ranging capacities of up to 1.6TB.

The drive, which comes in a 3.5-in. format and supports 4Gbit/sec. Fibre Channel connectivity, could take on a core element of the hard disk drive market, which uses the same format.

SSDs access data in microseconds, instead of the millliseconds that traditional hard drives use to retrieve data. The BitMicro E-Disk Altima 4Gb FC delivers more than 55,000 I/O operations per second (IOPS) and has a sustained data transfer rate over 230MB/sec. By comparison, a fast hard drive for example will run at around 300 IOPS.

BitMicro said its new line of SSDs range in storage capacity from 16GB to 1.6TB. The company Web site says it can reach the maximum capacity of 640GB in a 1-in. format, so two and a half 1-in. units would be needed to achieve a 1.6TB capacity.

The company said it has also developed two ASICs to boost SSD performance. The Enhanced Datamover and Storage Accelerator (EDSA) flash I/O controller supports large blocks of flash, enabling capacities to rise to the terabyte level.

EDSA works with the Logical Unifier of Extensive Transfer Arrays (LUNETA) ASIC, an interface controller designed to orchestrate massively parallel and multiblock I/O operations on large arrays of flash devices.

Competing products include Texas Memory Systems Inc.'s RamSan 500, a flash SSD with a dynamic RAM cache. That drive achieves up to 400,000 IOPS. Dutch company Attorn's HyperDrive 4 is a DRAM-based SSD that runs at 44,000 IOPS. Theoretically, DRAM should be faster than flash, but BitMicro's ASICS have made their flash faster.

Jeff Janukowicz, SSD research manager at IDC, said that some segments of the enterprise storage market require very high performance and reliability. "Increasingly, data centers will look to SSDs to satisfy these requirements," he said. "IDC expects worldwide enterprise SSD revenues to grow by 76% annually from 2006 to 2011."

Sampling for the Altima 4Gb FC SSD is expected to begin in the first quarter of 2008, with volumes shipping in the second quarter. No pricing information was released.

Some industry sources, such as FSC's chief technology officer, Joseph Reger, said that products such as BitMicro's could cause significant data center adoption of SSDs by 2010.