CeBIT 2007: Solid State Drives come of age

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Carpenter says the "iNAND chips [the main building blocks of flash devices] are already shipping in both 4GB and 8GB sizes. By combining these chips, it is easy to create large storage devices such as 1GB SSD." These are the chips that are already being deployed inside consumer devices, such as mobile telephones, today.

"Speed and power are two reasons why OEMs like SSD" says Carpenter. "Fifty per cent less power which means a laptop that runs for four hours will gain around 28 minutes. Transfer times on our 2.5 inch SSD show a write speed of 45MB/sec and a read speed of 67MB/sec which is much faster than any traditional hard disk technology. The biggest gain is access time. When a computer first accesses a hard disk it generally takes around 17ms but we can access that same data in under 0.1ms."

These figures have yet to be confirmed by independent testing but for security appliances such as firewalls and email scanners these speeds mean that very high performance gains are possible. For database applications doing transactional data or scientific applications where large amounts of data needs to be access for massively parallel processing, complex disk systems could be replaced by SSD and show significant improvements.

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