Chip maker Micron Technology announced Thursday a new line of PCIe-based solid-state drives (SSD) it claims are the fastest yet.
Dubbed the RealSSD P320h series, Micron (NASDAQ: MU) designed the full-height, half-length PCI Express cards for “extreme performance and endurance demanded by data-intensive enterprise applications,” according to the Boise, Idaho company.
Among the applications the P320h series is designed to support are cloud computing, high-performance computing (HPC), data analytics, business intelligence, Web serving, online transaction processing (OLTP) and video on demand, Micron officials said in a statement.
“The P320h system uses Micron’s proven 34-nanometer (nm) single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash memory technology, which provides two different user capacities: 350 GB and 700 GB. From the NAND silicon to the controller to the complete system solution, the P320h SSD is designed and developed by Micron,” the statement added.
Micron claims the P320h can handle as much as 3GB per second of data throughput, and it delivers 750,000 read input/output operations per second (IOPS) and some 341,000 write IOPS.
At those speeds, a single P320h could handle 1,500 individual HD video streams at once.
“The high random performance of the P320h system is equivalent to the amount of IOPS an Exchange server would need to support more than 1.5 million Outlook users. Additionally, for a traditional transactional database, such as an online bank operation transferring funds from one type of account to another, the P320h can achieve the same throughput as nearly 5,000 hard drives,” Micron’s statement said.
Micron is currently sampling the P320h series PCIe cards and plans volume shipments in the third quarter. Initial form factors will be 111.15 mm wide by 167.65 mm long by 14.47 mm thick.
The company said it is also working on other form factors, which it plans to introduce later this year.