The company has just released two "Lightning" high performance enterprise SSDs that threaten to blow away the competition.  The drives uses proprietary ASICs to deliver an incredible input-output performance per second (IOPS) that close to doubles the fastest of its competitors.  The Enterprise Flash Drive (EFD) LS offers 180,000 IOPS in a 3.5" form factor, while the 2.5" form factor EFD LB claims 140,000 IOPS of performance. 

If that's not enough to sate the appetite of even the most die-hard flash drive enthusiast, this will be --  the drives also offer 500MB/sec and 320 MB/sec reads and 420MB/sec read and 220MB/sec write rates for the 3.5" and 2.5", respectively.  This compares favorably to leading competitors, such as the OCZ Vertex Turbo, an overclocked SSD which offers 270 MB/sec reads and 210 MB/sec writes.

The 3.5" is available in 300 GB and 150 GB varieties, while the 2.5" is exclusively available in 150 GB form.

Greg Goelz, vice president of marketing at Pliant says the drives are also extremely hardy.  He brags, "Put it on a log application and write to it as hard as you want for five years -- it will run 24/7 for at least that long."

He claims the drives have no write limits, and will experience no performance degradation even when used continuously for up to five years.  He says his company is working with EMC Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., Hitachi Data Systems and Sun Microsystems Inc. to offer the drives in integrated solutions for businesses.

Joseph Unsworth, research director for NAND flash semi-conductors at Gartner Inc. thinks that Pliant may indeed shake up the market.  He states, "They're able to claim some pretty solid performance numbers on read and writes and they're also able to claim unlimited program and erase [write/erase] cycles.  That's big. In an enterprise environment, that's one of the major concerns: The wear out of the SSD."

The SSD moves up from the Fibre Channel interface used by many of its competitors, instead using a serial-attached SCSI (SAS) interface, which supports up to 6 Gbit/sec transfer speeds (compared to 4 Gbit/sec for most Fibre drives).  While 8 Gbit/sec Fibre products are on their way, Pliant has a trump card up its sleeve -- 12 Gbit/sec SCSI drives, set to drop in 2012.  Some competitors are jumping on the SAS bandwagon, but they are unable to match Pliant's lofty IOPS.

On an architecture level, the drives are pretty standard, using 12 I/O channels to interleaved single level cell (SLC) NAND flash chips from Samsung Corp.  What is special is its controller, an ASIC.  Most of the industry uses FPGAs controllers.  Also unique is the fact that Pliant has no DRAM cache, achieving its massive performance without the aid of caching.  And the drive also supports a special triple redundancy error correction code algorithm that makes sure data is correctly written, even if two copies of it are corrupted.

Eager to buy one?  Unfortunately for enthusiasts, the drives are enterprise only and will not be hitting consumer retail channels.  The cost?  Pliant remains mum, but it would comment that its drives would fall between the price of Intel X-25-E SSD 64GB SATA drive ($780) and the STECs Zeus SSD 73GB Fibre Channel drive ($6,000) -- so in theory one could conjecture electrifying drives might be had for around $3,000, if you're lucky.  Let's hope this initial business offering allows this new kid on the block to drop its prices a bit and enter the consumer market, as enthusiasts are surely thirsty for that kind of performance, if it can be had at a reasonable price.