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Hardware BiTMICRO Pumps SSD Capacities to 832GB
Brandon Hill (Blog) - January 4, 2008 1:55 PM
Print 69 comment(s) - last by Samus.. on Jan 25 at 5:14 AM
BiTMICRO promises super-capacity solid-state disk for Q3 2008

No, you didn't just misread the title to this article. BiTMICRO Networks is moving forward with plans to announce an 832GB SATA 2.5" solid-state disk (SSD) at this year's Consumer Electronics Show.

The new 832GB SSD is a part of BiTMICRO's E-Disk Altima family and uses multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory to increase storage densities. BiTMICRO claims that the drive will "deliver sustained rates of up to 100 MB per second and up to 20,000 I/O operations per second."

"This latest product pre-announcement seeks to establish BiTMICRO’s commitment to deliver solid state storage in all market applications," said Rudy Bruce, BiTMICRO's Executive VP for Marketing and Sales. "We are excited to offer E-Disk Altima SATA flash solid state drive as a PC and enterprise storage alternative offering the best-in-class capacity, performance and reliability."

The 416GB counterpart to BiTMICRO's newest SSD entry was announced in early September 2007. At that time, BiTMICRO said that samples of its E-Disk Altima family would ship in Q1 2008 with production availability coming in March 2008.

BiTMICRO has since revised that forecast and projects that samples of the E-Disk Altima will be available during Q2 2008 with production models ranging from 32GB to 832GB coming in Q3 2008.

Pricing hasn't been announced for the massive 832GB drive, but expect to pay a pretty penny. Considering that 128GB SSDs can hover around the $4,000 USD mark, it's not too far-fetched to project that an 832GB SSD could be had for the price of a BMW 1-Series.

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RE: One question
By mindless1 on 1/5/2008 4:23:15 AM , Rating: 2
Since someone who is cluesss downrated my post, I should elaborate.

IF it weren't for the volume limitations of the case size, it wouldn't have to use MLC chips to achieve this capacity.

What does that mean? It means not only higher write speeds, it typically means 10X the write cycles. If you're spending several thousand dollars, this seems not so great a demand.


RE: One question
By Lonyo on 1/5/2008 6:14:28 AM , Rating: 2
But who would buy a 3.5" SSD?
3.5" SSD's would be even less competitive in terms of price on the desktop, they would have narrower compatibility, and they offer little benefit to desktops (you don't need to be an concerned about power consumption etc in a desktop computer since it doesn't run on batteries).

I think they're probably using 2.5" drives because that's the way to get most demand for this type of product while costs remain high.


RE: One question
By mindless1 on 1/7/2008 4:12:17 AM , Rating: 2
Would would buy - anyone who wants most capacity possible

Less Competitive - Completely non-applicable, the idea of price competition has no merit since it costs so much more than anything else

Benefit - Same as in a laptop, higher speed, reliability, less prone to mechanical crashes. The idea that a benefit is lower power is mostly wishful thinking, in a laptop the HDD is only a minor consumer of power.

I'm not saying they should do away with 2.5". Not at all, if you reread what I wrote I am saying that for this price they should be making products for MORE form factors than just 2.5".

For example, today you could have had a 2TB SLC chipped SSD in a 3.5" form factor. When thinking of mechanical HDDs, the internal data transfer rates were a limitation due to the platter, but with SSD and SATA300 plus the low latency you don't need as many *drives* to reach a performance level, or in this volume, the capacity.

Who would buy it is anyone that isn't thinking the same as you that it needs to be smaller than the available space to mount it. Solid state drives are the future of PCs as well as laptops!


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