January 10, 2008 New Jersey based startup pureSilicon announced their Nitro SSD line including the first 1TB 2.5" SSD at CES 2009. We had a chance to talk to their CEO, Jason Breakstone, and ask a few questions.
The company claims that the 1TB Nitro SSD is the most compact SSD per gigabyte available. This density works out to be 15.40GB per cubic centimeter in a 2.5-inch form-factor, which is about 3x more than existing SSD's on the market. When questioned, the company said that their methods used to fit all that flash memory into a 2.5" enclosure was something they want to keep a secret for now. However they did it, they've managed to cram 64 double stacked 64Gb chips (for a total of 128 flash memory chips) as well as 512MB of buffer memory and a high performance 32 channel SATA2 controller into the package. We are quite impressed.
This company says that the Nitro SSDs are designed for applications where data throughput and power consumption are important. We reckon that any user would say that would qualify for just about anything. pureSilicon also claims that they have benchmarked these drives at speeds approaching the maximum bus speed of SATA II (300 MB/s).
Expect to see these big boys around mid-2009 for a price that's yet to be determined.
Dave Weinstein