At CES this year, there was no shortage of storage talk. But we know that you want to hear about solid state drives (SSDs) and where they're going. Good thing because a company called pureSilicon just announced its 1 TB SSD. That's right: one terabyte.
pureSilicon claims that it is the first in the world with a SSD that breaks reaches the 1 TB barrier. SSD capacity has always been the technology's Achilles' heel, but that could all change. Changing fast is another issue however, as pureSilicon's line of Nitro 1 TB SSD drives are not for the consumer market--even though this is the "CES."
When the Nitro drive becomes available sometime in Q3'09, it will only be available for industrial applications, like military, medical and the like. Consumers like us will have to wait for other manufacturers to catch up. pureSilicon says:
This represents a major advance for the storage industry since it combines maximum density with high performance and low power demand. Four of these drives deliver 4TB in the same space as a standard 3.5-inch HDD, so server footprint requirements and energy consumption in data-intensive applications can be considerably reduced.
The 1TB Nitro SSD is the most compact SSD per gigabyte: 15.40GB per cubic centimeter in a 2.5-inch form-factor -- at least three times greater than any other SSD on the market. This high density in a small form factor has been achieved through innovative engineering techniques coupled with advanced industrial design that yields an exceptionally thin enclosure.
Currently pricing is not available, but we can only guess that pureSilicon's Nitro line will cost all your arms and legs. Despite this, pureSilicon has shown that high capacity SSD drives are possible in the same form factors that we're all use to. Just don't expect to see drives in this range available any time soon.
Some specifications of the Nitro 1 TB SSD:
Specifications - Nitro Series SSD:
Capacities: 32GB, 64GB, 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, 1024GB
Performance
-- Transfer rate: 300MB/sec
-- Sustained read: 240MB/sec
-- Sustained write: 215MB/sec
-- Random read (IOPS 4K): 50,000
-- Random write (IOPS 4K): 10,000
-- Latency < 100 µsec
Reliability
-- MTTF: 2.0 million hours
