14 DAY TRIAL // Capacity is the one area where solid state drives are still well behind hard disk drives, but the efforts of a certain company may finally eliminate this disadvantage, though likely not the sheer cost of NAND Flash storage.
Then again, it's not like anyone expects solid state drives to become as cheap as hard disk drives in the near future. The manufacturing costs are just too far apart for that right now.
Regardless of that, however, high-capacity solid state drives can be a godsend for many people, not just normal consumers but business and enterprise customers.
A good case can be made for the latter being much more likely to buy anything of the sort. After all, while consumers can make do with a low-capacity SSD for caching purposes, companies and server service providers can't.
Mostly because for them it's not a simple matter of storing just the OS on the SSD for fast boot and the like. They need all stored files to be quickly accessible, and HDDs have a performance bottleneck that everyone wants to escape.
Sage is offering the chance to overcome that performance bottleneck
Solid state drives can be excellent additions to a server, data center, or supercomputer, thanks to the very fast access times of data compared to HDDs.
Capacity has really been the only thing limiting their use, despite the generally smaller form factor (2.5-inch versus 3.5-inch).
Sage Microelectronics, a new data storage company, has now revealed the solution: an SSD controller chip that can cope with an SSD density of up to 5 TB.
Currently, Sage is selling 2.5-inch SSDs of 2.5 TB, which are already rare and impressive. Soon, though, there will be 5 TB drives as well.
It'll probably be harder to cram all that storage space in the small 2.5-inch form factor than adopting the controller. We have a feeling that Samsung's 3D V-NAND will see a lot of demand in the coming months.
The controller uses SATA II interface to drive 10 channels of SD, MM, or eMMC flash memory cards, with each channel supporting up to 512 GB.
Unfortunately, this reveals the one, pretty large pitfall: the performance is limited to SATA II 3 Gbps, not SATA III 6 Gbps. At least that still allows for 375 MB/s transfers, which is better than HDDs can permit for the most part. Still a really big turnoff though.
Availability
Sage is preparing two chips in addition to the S681 that supports 10 channels: the S682, which supports 5 memory channels, and the S685, with support 4 memory channels.
In addition to 5 TB SSDs, we can look forward to new eMMC BGA modules and SD memory cards. Unfortunately, there's no word on what corporations have adopted the controllers or how much time is left before products like that reach the market.