Storage
Start-up Pliant claims to have secret for speedier SSDs
Fledgling storage firm Pliant Technologies has thrown off its startup invisibility cloak, and claims it can greatly improve the performance of Flash-based solid state drives. Pliant said this week it received $8m in first round funding funding, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, to develop a "new class" of SSDs for big business …
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Nifty
I hope it will successfully make it to market.
Would a SATA or SCSI/SAS/etc interface be able to keep up with such a device?
Consumer Market?
"Because of the architecture that we use, the drive doesn't add any significant cost over traditional high-end flash drives"
This means we can get a 4GB for about 40 quid then eh? Forgive my scepticism but I suspect they will be 1000s of £/$ each despite their admission that they are almost as cheap to manufacture as flash drives.
not just the IO interface
If you think about the chain of components that make up the IO stack, then ultra fast drives is going to challenge a lot more than just the SATA/SCSI/FC interface.
A 4Gb FC interface to a host can only really sustain 340MB/s - which, if these things deliver as they claim, means you wont need more than a very few to saturate that bus. Even 10Gb only pushes it out the way a little.
But imagine how your TB class DB could perform will all the redo logs on these babies, with multiple load balanced 10Gb channels
oh lordy - sticky at the thought.
puzzled
Isn't the limit on flash based SSD's down to the physical speed of flash memory, rather than any controller issues?
Paris, because she has a much of a clue to the answer as I do at the moment.
@Steve
yes, but one can balance reads and, especially, writes, across multiple chips. The more chips you have and the better logic to balance writes, the bettter potential performance improvement.
Patent application from the founders
A patent application from two co-founders of Pliant, Olbrich (CTO) and Prins (Chief Architect), can be found by Googling for USPTO Application #: 20070294468 "Architecture for reading and writing to flash memory"
Not exactly earth shattering - use of multiple processors between a DDR RAM buffer and flash devices. [sarcasm] I wonder why that hasn't been thought of before?[/sarcasm]
re: Consumer Market?
Are you actually saying that you consider a 4GB Sandisk/PNY/whatever USB flash-based memory stick to be a "high-end flash drive"? If so, then please cover yourself in foil so we can identify you. By "high-end flash drive", he's talking about actual SSDs, not flash-based memory sticks. I would assume he means something with 128GB+ capacity, and something with an actual drive interface (FC, SAS, SCSI, SATA, etc), which currently cost $3000+.
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