BitMicro pumps solid state drives to 1.6TB
Found on The Register on Saturday, 17 November 2007
Storage vendors have been sieging the large business market with solid state drive offerings for years - but cost and capacity restrictions have mostly kept them at the gate.
Take BitMicro for instance, which this week unveiled a flash memory-based solid state drive with up to 1.6TB capacity. The company's E-Disk Altima, expected to ship in Q1 2008, will come in a 3.5-inch format and support 4Gbit/s Fibre Channel.
BitMicro says the Altima offers sustained rates of more than 230MB/s and upwards of 55,000 I/O operations per second. To compare, a fast disk drive will get about 400 I/O operations per second.
Sounds all nice and interesting, but the most important information is missing, and I think it was not forgotten by accident. The price. A lot of capacity is always great, but it has to compete with the everyday harddrive. And when you can get an external 1TB harddisk for around $300, then it will be hard to beat.