Available in two form factors
Pliant Technology is the latest vendor to join the solid state drive space with the announcement of 2.5- and 3.5-inch enterprise flash drives (EFD).
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The company’s Lightning EFDs are Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drives in two capacities. The LS is available in 150G and 300GB capacities; the LB is available in 150GB capacity only. Both implementations are of single-level cell technology.
The 3.5-inch LS drive has a total in sustained IOPs of 180,000 and a sustained data transfer rate of 500MBps for reads and 380MBps for writes. It features 3.9 watts of energy consumption when idle and 7.9 watts when operational.
The 2.5-inch LB drive has sustained IOPs of 160,000 and a sustained data transfer rate of 450MBps on reads and 250MBps on writes. It features the same energy consumption when idle as the LS, but a smaller energy consumption of 5.9 watts when operational.
SAS offers fully independent full duplex dual-ported technology that makes concurrent writing and reading possible. It also offers 4x the link bandwidth of Serial ATA and allows multiple initiators.
Unlike other EFDs on the market that use volatile write caches, Pliants SSD provide none. The Pliant Lightning SSDs also offer unlimited write capability.
Pliant is funded by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Menlo Ventures, Arcturus Capital and Divergent Ventures for around $27 million in total funding.
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