Micron Technology, which co-owns and operates flash memory foundries with Intel in Utah and Singapore, has provided details on its RealSSD P320h PCIe solid state drive that had been displayed inside a block of plastic at the spring Storage Networking World conference.
Intel and Micron first to 25nm with new flash memory chips
This is the first PCIe product from a foundry owner, and comes into an increasingly crowded field. Two years ago, Fusion-io was the only provider of this type of SSD. Now, LSI, NetApp, OCZ, Texas Memory and Virident are shipping products with STEC, Pliant, and EMC all rumored to have enterprise PCIe products under development.
The design of the P320h is clearly for enterprise applications, with its all-Micron developed control circuits, device drivers and 34nm single level cell (SLC) flash memories. SLC memories have the advantage over two-bit per cell multi-level cell flash in speed and long-term endurance. The disadvantage is that they cost the foundry owner about twice as much, at a given lithography size.
Micron coined the term redundant array of independent NAND (RAIN) as a method to stripe data across multiple flash memory channels, providing error correction and rapid multipath access. The P320h is capable of writing 28TB per day for five years. The first version of the P320h series is a full height, half-length form factor with 350GB and 700GB useable capacity options, over-provisioned from 512GB and 1TB respectively. The 350GB model uses 64 quad die packs and the 700GB model uses 64 eight die packs of 16Gb (2GB) flash dies. Control functions are performed by an ASIC so the host driver only needs to provide a block storage emulation rather than the care and feeding of the flash memories.
Built for speed, Micron claims three GB/sec. sequential reads and two GB/sec. sequential writes. Random 4KB reads up to 750,000 IOPs and 4K random writes up to 341,000 IOPs make the P320h a serious contender for enterprise applications like video streaming, on-line transaction processing, virtual desktop implementation and database access.
The P320h is currently being sampled with full production ramping in the third quarter. Pricing is expected to be competitive at less than $16 per GB.
