You can't go around it, the Computex Exhibition in Taiwan is an opportunity for many companies to announce their latest products and technologies. We bring you a small roundup of today's announcements.
Asus
Cnet reports that Asus is showcasing a Thunderbolt SSD which should become available in a 128GB and 256GB capacity and which is configured as RAID 0 out of the box. According to Cnet the drive should become available in about two months, with no pricing information available.
Biwin
Biwin announced that it is showcasing a demo system with a PCI Express (PCIe) based SSD, while not becoming available on the market, it is the precursor to the company’s future line of PCIe-based enterprise class SSDs. The product, dubbed the HemiDrive 1, is the company’s first engineering milestone on the road to developing a line of PCIe SSDs. HemiDrive 1 reaches sequential read and write speeds up to 1200MB/sec and 900MB/sec respectively, and up to 45,000 4K random write IOPS. Biwin expects their future PCIe SSD products to be even faster.
LSI
LSI has issued a press release stating that they showcase SSDs with 19nm Toshiba and 20nm Intel NAND flash memory using their SandForce SF-2000 Flash Storage Processors at Computex. This controller is able to correct 55-bit errors per 512 byte sectors. Error correction is important for the success of SSDs as their sizes shrink, so the density of the data increases and it's becoming more difficult to hold the charge which encodes the data, resulting in reduced reliability. The controllers also utilize DuraClass advanced NAND flash management technology which consists of DuraWrite (technology to optimze read/write cycles for durability), RAISE (RAID like data protection/recovery technology), Advanced Wear Leveling and Monitoring (improving endurance) and Recycler (erases invalid data without making the drive less durable).
Sandisk
Sandisk has announced a PCI Express Solid State Accelerator (SSA) card. This bootable PCIe card can be added to computers in the PCIe slot and comes in either a 200GB or 400GB capacity. The SSA card can be used together with FlashSoft data caching software to speed up Windows. It is targeted at enterprises and the price underlines it, the 200GB drive is $1,350, the 400GB one is $2,350.
