14 DAY TRIAL // PCI Express solid state drives have proven to be extremely popular in the enterprise world, so Micron has announced a model of its own, the RealSSD P320h, which has now become the first drive to feature a native PCI-E SSD controller.
Usually, PCI Express solid state drives are built by connecting together a series of SSDs via a RAID controller that also included a PCI Express bridge chip.
While such a solution is relatively easy to built, it has the disadvantage of having to overcome a series of bottlenecks that can be imposed by the RAID controller itself or by the SATA interface.
In comparison, a native PCI Express SSD controller design, has no such limitations as it skips the RAID chip entirely and directly communicates with the PCI-E interface.
This enables the drive to deliver better performance and Micron is the first company to develop such a controller.
Micron's first SSD to feature the new IC is the RealSSD P320h, which, according to Micron, is capable of reaching sequential read/write performance up to 3GB/s and 2GB/s, respectively, as well as 750,000 random 4KB read IOPS and 341,000 random 4KB write IOPS.
The drive will be available with either 350GB or 700GB of storage and is built using 34nm SLC NAND Flash that is connected to the PCI-E controller via 32 parallel channels.
Micron's RealSSD P320h also features support for NAND redundancy thanks to the company's RAIN (Redundant Array of Independent NAND) technology, which is presumably similar to RAID-7 with 1 parity channel.
"Micron is defining a whole new category of enterprise-class storage with our P320h PCIe solid-state storage systems," said Gary Gentry, general manager, enterprise division, Micron's NAND solutions group.
"The P320h provides customers with the most compelling performance solution in the industry," concluded the company's rep.
Pricing hasn't been officially announced, but Micron expects these drives to retail for about $16/GB, meaning the 350GB model should be priced around $5600, while the 700GB version should sell for $11,200.