14 DAY TRIAL // Though analysts believe that hard-drive adoption will once again start growing on the enterprise market, makers of solid state drives don't seem inclined to slow down their SSD development. As evidence of this fact, RunCore has been working on a new series of Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) flash storage units that apparently place performance and reliability ahead of all else.
RunCore will offer 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch SSDs with a power consumption of 2.6W and featuring ECC, Power-down protection and an on-board temperature sensor. They will be compatible with Windows XP 32/64, Vista 32/64, Windows 7 32/64, Mac OS X 10, Vxwork and Linux.
The new line is known as the Kylin II and is made up of SSDs with capacities between 50GB and 400GB. They are all meant for professional applications, which is why the company constructed not only models based on more or less affordable multi-level cell NAND chips, but also some built out of single-level cell (SLC) NAND chips.
All Kylin II models have an on-board cache memory of 64MB and are based on the SandForce controller. Consumers and business users alike will probably recognize this controller, given that it is present in a very large number of available and upcoming high-quality SSDs. This is because it enables very high sustainable read and write speeds, not just compared with HDDs, but also with most other flash-based solutions. In this case, SandForce reads at 270MB/s and writes at 260MB/s.
It should likely be noted that RunCore optimized the Kylin II series for more IOPS (Input/Output per second), namely 30,000 and 25,000 when reading and writing, respectively. This does not only improve performance, but it reduces drive size, improves power-consumption efficiency and, thus, lowers the total cost of ownership. It is unclear when the products will start selling, but all will be backed by a three-year warranty.