Micron demos ultra fast 1GB/sec SSD

Posted at: 5:53pm 26th November 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

Pair of solid state disks mounted on PCI-E cards show stunning potential of storage technology

It may be a while before this technology reaches the average PC or laptop, but Micron has demonstrated potential read speeds of over 1GB/sec on its latest Washington SSDs, which are mounted on PCI-E cards.

On Micron’s Advanced Storage Blog, Joe Jeddeloh from the company demonstrated the potential of its advanced SLC (single level cell) SSD technology in a particularly amateur and shaky video (see below), but if the claims are correct then Micron is really onto a winner here. The video shows two SSD PCI-E cards running on an eight-core Xeon system. Unfortunately, you can’t see the details in the benchmarks, but Jeddeloh claims that the pair of cards are racking up 200,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second) in the test.

He also makes some interesting claims about the cards’ speed in random write tests, which are still slower than the read tests, but a lot quicker than current SSDs, with a single SSD card apparently managing 80,000 IOPS and a pair of cards handling between 150,000 and 160,000 IOPS.

In terms of raw bandwidth figures, Jeddeloh says that one drive can read at around 800MB/sec, while a pair of cards can read at 1GB/sec. As a point of comparison, Intel’s X25-M SSD had an average read speed of 225.7MB/sec in our tests, and the S-ATA II interface only has a maximum transfer rate of 300MB/sec.

Micron claims that there’s nothing special about the flash memory it uses, and that the drives are still ‘your typical vanilla SSDs.’ The difference, according to Jeddeloh, is that it’s ‘managed correctly.’ At the end of the video, Jeddeloh also shows off a single 8x PCI-E card that features two SSDs on a single card that he says can also offer 1GB/sec of bandwidth.

Micron says that it plans ‘wide availability’ of the product in 2010, but that it’s going to be targeted at enterprise customers first. However, the company does say that ‘this is a good indication on where this technology can take us in the future,’ adding that ‘it is within the realm of possibility to deliver this type of performance in a laptop if the architecture would support it.’ Currently, standard desktop and laptop buses would be unable to provide the throughput needed, but if that was to change in the future then we could be looking at incredibly fast SSDs in the future.