The end of traditional spinning disks might have come one step closer with the release of Micron's new blazing fast solid-state drive. Although PCIe drives have been on the market for some time, none of them have ever attained the speed of this newest arrival. The RealSSD P320h is capable of 3GBps when reading, and 2GBps when writing data.
Loads of data is processed online all over the world these days, especially if you count services like YouTube, Facebook, Netflix and other cloud computing technologies. YouTube announced recently that its users upload 48 hours of video every minute, and according to IDC, there were 1.2 zettabytes (that's 1.2 billion terabytes) of data processed throughout 2010. This means there's a very high demand on storage systems to increase the speed of data access.
The Micron RealSSD P320h is aimed at the enterprise market, so if you have your own server or run a very busy website on your own, it might be worth a closer look. The number of IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) gets to as high as 750,000 reading and 341,000 writing. That means, for example, that the P320h drive (working in a cloud media streaming application) could serve data fast enough to feed 1,500 simultaneous individual HD video streams (16Mb/s each).
See the performance demo below:
The disk's endurance is also impressive. According to Micron, the 700GB drive is able to write 28 terabytes of data every day for five years. Some enterprise clients will certainly appreciate its tiny dimensions too - it's reminiscent of a graphics card from the past, measuring 111.15 mm wide x 167.65 mm long x 14.47 mm thick.
The RealSSD P320h comes in two capacities: 350GB or 700GB. Micron plans to start with mass production in Q3, but samples are available now. Pricing is not yet announced, though there are rumors it might be around US$16/GB.