Bitmicro Launches 1.6-Terabyte Solid-State Drive

[dock98]

February 6, 2008

Bitmicro Launches 1.6-Terabyte Solid-State Drive

By Mark Hachman

While other solid-state drive makers are offering 2.5-inch drives in the tens of gigabytes, Bitmicro Networks has announced a monster of a solid-state drive, at 1.6 terabytes.

The E-Disk Altima E3S320, available in a standard 3.5-inch form factor, will sample in the second quarter of 2008 and will ship in volume by the third quarter, with capacities ranging from 16GB to 1.6 TB.

Is this your next PC drive? It's very, very unlikely. A call put into BitMicro for comment and pricing was not returned. However, it's probable that the drive will cost thousands of dollars. BitMicro is selling the drive into the enterprise, but also for military applications. Solid-state drives are know for their speed, but also their ruggedness.

Aside from the whopping capacity, the drive is relatively mundane: of note is the Ultra 320 SCSI interface, which the company claims is a first. The drive will transfer data at an average rate of 230 Mbytes/sec, peaking at 320 MB/sec in burst mode).

What's interesting is that, for all of its capacity, the drive uses just single-level cell flash, instead of the multi-level cell (MLC) flash that's become more common as flash endors attempt to pack more storage inside a given volume of space. The key, Bitmicro said, was its Enhanced Datamover and Storage Accelerator (EDSA) flash I/O controller, a proprietary ASIC.