Hybrid Solid State Storage Drives Arrive

By Greg McNevin

February 2nd, 2007: Time has a sneaky way of creeping up on you, however, unlike the discovery of a grey hair the steady march of solid state storage technology into the mainstream cannot come soon enough. Thankfully, the first hybrids and pure SSD are beginning to arrive.

Network attached storage (NAS) specialist the Dynamic Network Factory (DNF) has just released its latest Hyper Solid State (HSS) disk drive technology, pushing it as an energy-efficient new breed of disk storage offering up to 20 times the performance of 15,000 RPM SAS, SCSI and Fibre Channel disk drives.

The solution is a hybrid of traditional magnetic disk technology and random access memory, all crammed into a standard 3.5” form factor. This enables the drive to be slotted into existing machines and connected via the standard ATA interface.

While solid state storage solutions offer synapticly-fast data storage, it has traditionally suffered from limited capacity. DSS’s hybrid drive escapes the 8GB, 16GB and 32GB boundaries that recent SSDs have been limited by, offering 120GB straight off the bat with 200GB models to be available soon.

“Traditional Solid State disk technologies are extremely expensive, at about $250 per GB, and are only available in 8, 16 and 32GB capacities,” says Mo Tahmasebi, CEO of DNF. “DNF address these shortcomings with Hyper Solid State disks that offer 15 times the storage capacity at a similar price.”

With capacities of up to 200GB per disk, the new drives use 16 percent less power than 146GB, 15,000 RPM SAS disks, and 24 percent less than 15,000-RPM Fibre Channel disks. In addition, with power consumption of only 12.5W, they use less power than a standard 500GB 7200 RPM drive.

According to Tahmasebi, the HSS uses between 16 and 24 percent less power than standard 15,000 RPM fibre channel disks, and performs well when held up against pure Solid State disks. “Performance is comparable to traditional Solid State disks, but HSS offers higher capacities than the readily available 8 and 16GB Solid State disks,” he said. “In addition, not only is HSS a better choice for storage systems in demanding, transaction-intensive applications, but it also reduces operational costs with lower power consumption.”

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