“Impenetrable” US$100/Mb SSD Price Barrier Broken

By Greg McNevin

June 20, 2007: Solid state storage technology is snowballing into mainstream use now, and as its use ramps up costs naturally come down. With this in mind, Solid Data Systems has announced that it is significantly cutting the cost of its family of solid state disk (SSD) systems.

Thanks to the decreasing cost of memory, the company has broken through the once thought impenetrable US$100/Mb (AU$118) price barrier, offering its customers 100 Gigabyte Fibre SSD’s for the amount a 10 Gigabyte SCSI SSD would have set them back in 2002.

This represents a dramatic cost breakthrough, “a 10X price reduction and a 10X density improvement in just five years,” according to Wade Tuma, CEO of Solid Data Systems.

Solid Data claims its SSDs store and retrieve data with a latency of less than 10 microseconds, giving its appliances the lowest latency, non-volatile, external storage systems in the industry.

Despite cost cutting though, SSDs are still pricey. They are more expensive than magnetic disks on a per byte basis, however, Solid Data makes the case that the total cost of ownership (TCO) of its solutions can be significantly lower when server, licensing, power consumption and maintenance expenses are taken into account.

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