14 DAY TRIAL // We've seen some truly ludicrous applications of solid state drive technology, the latest of which being SATA Express and/or M.2 drives with a transfer speed of 1.8 GB/s. Now, though, HGST has introduced something that left more than one person flabbergasted.
Basically, the Western Digital company formerly known as Hitachi has introduced a solid state drive that can perform three million input/output operations per second. Three million random read IOs per second of 512 bytes each.
Considering that the vast majority of SSDs only manage 30,000 to 90,000 on their best day, at least over the SATA interface, that is a huge improvement, of a factor of 30 to 100.
PCI Express technology was used for the connection to a PC, of course. There is no other interface that can permit for such a high performance level. HGST expects its breakthrough to lead to an entire new class of block storage devices.
Unfortunately, the press release did not say how the three million IOPS translated into real-world, sequential performance. Possibly because the speed might be higher than what NAND Flash chips can actually handle.
If not that, then perhaps there is no firmware or system OS that can fully leverage the new technology, so any sequential read/write numbers would have been premature and misleading at this time.
Considering that 90,000 IOPS SSDs can achieve 550 MB/s read and 540 MB/s write over SATA if they use the best controller chips, maybe we're looking at well beyond the 1.8 GB/s of SATA Express / PCIe M.2 models.
For those who want further technical details, the random read access latency was of 1.5 microseconds (us) in non-queued settings for the new HGST SSD. Impossible for any SSD architecture and NAND Flash memory today.
The company expects the new SSD (which is made of PCM components, Phase Change Memory) to be used in next-generation servers. The first drives will be made of 45nm 1 Gb PCM chips and feature the PCI Express 2x4 SSD card form factor. The latency of 1 us was achieved with help from researchers at the University of California, San Diego.
Over the next 2 days, the HGST PCM SSD will be demoed at the Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara, CA. Maybe we'll learn some sequential speed rates then, so stick around for updates. No doubt the company, or its owner Western Digital, has already secured a deal or two.