The New Storage Speed Champ

By Doug Barney

Solid state storage devices are giving the sometimes dour world of storage a little sizzle. These drives not only make the MacBook Air ultra thin, but they are so reliable that companies like IBM are putting them in servers, claiming it dramatically reduces the needs for backups. They are that dependable.

But solid state is more than reliable — they are apparently fast as all get out. Texas Memory Systems, Inc. of Houston claims that its RamSan-400 solid-state disk “delivered a record 291,208.58 SPC-1 IOPS (input/output requests per second) with a record average response time of just 0.86 milliseconds. The RamSan-400 also established a new SPC-1 Price-Performance record by delivering that performance at just $0.67 per SPC-1 IOPS,” the company maintains. It might sound like mumbo-jumbo to non-storage experts, but that’s bloody fast.

The biggest issue with solid state is still price (a smallish laptop drive can cost almost a grand). But as with nearly all technologies, the market will beat the price down to where we can all afford this form of fast, reliable storage — eventually.

http://www.superssd.com/pressrelease/2008-01-28.htm