512 GB Solid-State Drives: The Revolution Has Begun!

Solid-state drives are already the new trend if you own a laptop and have the necessary money to spare. The bad news was that the SSDs are in the pioneering stage and capacity barriers are somewhat low as compared to the classic hard-drive industry.

A few days ago, Micron has made a bold move and introduced 32 and 64 GB solid-state NAND-based discs that should do a good job inside a business notebook, for example. Multimedia fanatics, however, may prove themselves disappointed with 64 GB of storage, since an HD-DVD would engulf most of the available space.

STEC, a US memory and storage solution provider has just unveiled the industry's first multi-level cell (MLC)-based solid state drive: the MACH8-MLC. Their new line of SSDs is the company's response to the users' demand in viable storage solutions at affordable prices.

Solid-state drives are a compelling alternative to hard disks, but the current price for the new technology still prevents it from entering the mainstream line of products. Low price can be achieved only by using the MLC NAND technology, which is a difficult objective, since MLC NAND features slow write speeds and very low write/erase endurance.

"STEC continues to provide innovative SSD solutions with advanced controller technology that enables superior performance and reliability, while optimizing costs", said Patrick Wilkison, vice president of marketing and business development for STEC. "Through our long history of SSD development STEC has amassed proprietary technologies to ensure optimal drive-level reliability -- so solving the challenge of performance and reliability for an MLC-based SSD was a subset of the technology previously developed and deployed for enterprise-class SSD. As a result of this latest technology breakthrough, STEC is first to offer an MLC-based SSD solution."

The Company has successfully leveraged multi-level cell-based (MLC) NAND into SSDs with 90MB/s read / 60MB/s write speeds, which exceeds even the platter-based hard drive performance. STEC's solution is alleged to cut the dollar-per-gigabyte price down to just $2/GB within two years. The MACH8-MLC SSD has started sampling to original equipment manufacturers, but the producers did not specify when the SSD would enter mass-manufacturing.