MOSAID Technologies has unveiled an SSD prototype that shows some promising innovation over the drives that are currently available.
Where the current selection of SSD’s on the market today require eight or more channels to achieve their transfer speeds, the company has created an SSD that performs just as well on just a single channel by using HyperLink NAND (HLNAND) technology. MOSAID achieved this by using two of their 64GB HLDIMM modules arranged on each channel, combined with an INDILINX controller and system board.
"The goal of the HLNAND program is to develop advanced solutions that will significantly enhance the performance of Flash technology in commercial products," explained Jin-Ki Kim, Vice President of MOSAID’s research and development team. "Our prototype demonstrates the unprecedented level of Flash performance and flexibility that can be delivered in an SSD when implementing HLNAND technology. With our solution, SSD designers can achieve an industry leading concentration of throughput on each channel, without experiencing roll-off with heavily populated rings."
According to bit-tech, the 3.5” HLNAND SSD prototype is only able to achieve 120MB/s read and 73Mb/s write speeds per channel despite MOSAIDS claims that the drive is capable of read speeds up to 213MB/s and write speeds of up to 130MB/s. However, MOSAID claims that design limitations required them to reduce the speed of the controller from 133MHz to 75MHz, and that a production HLNAND SSD with eight channels “would operate at the full 133MHz clock to achieve read and write throughput each exceeding 1TB/s.”
MOSAID is currently looking at licensing their technology for use in several types of devices including workstations, mobile devices, and drives. Devices using HLNAND 64GB NAND Flash memory devices and HLDIMM modules will likely make their debut in the enterprise market first, and at a price well out of reach to the average consumer.
If it’s true that manufacturers will have the ability to chain up to 255 flash devices on a single channel with no loss in data throughput, as MOSAID claims, we should at least see some pretty impressive high-capacity devices being developed in the near future.
