Startup announces breakthrough for superfast SSDs - using RAM slots

The startup Diablo Technologies today announced a technology to boost the speed of Solid State Disks (SSDs) by putting them in RAM slots. You could consider this as acting as non-volatile RAM. The company calls its technology Memory Channel Storage (MCS) and claims that it bypasses the bandwidth and latency limits of SATA-3 and even PCI Express.

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SATA-3 is commonly used to connect modern SSDs to a computer and has a maximum throughput of 600 MB/s. Due to that limit SSDs with the PCI Express (PCIe) interface are becoming increasingly popular. This interface has a bandwidth that's a multitude of SATA-3. But Diablo Technologies claims that SSDs will be even faster when they can use bandwidth available  from the memory controller to the CPU. Therefor the company has SSDs that fit in the DIMM slots of a computer but instead of RAM they contain NAND memory.

Computer memory, or (D) RAM connections go directly to the CPU and are optimized for low latency transfers and able to process massive amounts of data in parallel. This results in an enormous amount of bandwidth available to transfer data, at low latency and close to the CPU. According to Diablo technologies those are ideal circumstances to boost the performance of a SSD. The company claims that their Memory Storage Channel technology has 1/8 the latency of a PCIe based SSD with incredible amounts of bandwidth.

The MCS architecture uses the industry standard DIMM form factor and DDR-3 CPU interface, which should make it simple to integrate it in computers. It will likely mainly appear in high end servers and enterprise solutions, but its small form-factor and great speed will also make it an interesting product for those who want super fast storage in their computer.

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