Micron demonstrates non-volatile drive capable of 1GB/s throughput.
One of the inherent problems with storage in ordinary desktop machines is that hard drives are just so damned slow. Whenever they’re the bottleneck, they really make sure you know about it, whether moving files around or trying to load a game. Aside from cooling and the optical storage, they’re the last bit of mechanical hardware.
What’s oddly amusing about all this are the hard drive’s data interfaces and, more specifically, the speeds they support. You won’t find a modern desktop hard drive that can consistently flood even an ancient Parallel ATA/100 port (100MB/s). Yet, these days, our machines are outfitted with the fancy new SATA port that can tackle almost four times the bandwidth at 3Gb/s (375MB/s).
Of course, hard drives are cheap and can hold an imperial crap-tonne of data, so whipping out a RAID is one idea, but they’re still going to drag their mechanical feet along the floor with access times, not to mention those dreamy mechanical failures.
This is where solid-state drives come in, as they’re dramatically increasing in speed and feature practically instantaneous random access times. But because they’re still a relatively new form of storage media, up until now, they’ve also been really damned expensive.
You can rest assured nothing has changed in that department. As reported by ComputerWorld, the latest news from the SSD arena comes from Micron who says it’s preparing to unleash a solid-state drive that’s capable of an astonishing 800MB/s of throughput, claiming it can push it up to 1GB/s. SATA, funnily enough, is too slow, so Micron designed the beastly thing to plug directly into the PCI-Express expansion slot.
No prices are available, but you can be sure this will stay in the enterprise market for at least a little while. Meanwhile, watch the Micron kids get all excited:
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