HGST is claiming it has built the fastest flash card for storage and will unveil the device at the Flash Memory Summit 2014 in San Jose, Calif.
The flash drive is a solid-state drive which boasts improved latency thanks to tweaks of hardware and software, and provides much better overall performance.
The PCIe device boasts 3 million random read IOs per second of 512 bytes each when running in a queued environment, according to a recent report. Its random read access latency of 1.5 microseconds in nonqueued settings is also quite impressive.
HGST developed its own proprietary low-latency technology to boost performance on its solid-state flash PCIe card, as another report points out.
It also uses next-generation nonvolatile memory components, which are 1 Gb Phase Change Memory parts built on a 45-nm process. These components were carefully integrated into the PCIe Gen2 x4 SSD card the company developed for speedy storage. HGST engineers collaborated with University of California researchers in San Diego to pack the fastest punch with the PCIe flash card technology.
"What is really exciting is to be able to deliver latencies close to 1us for small block random reads. This is something that just cannot be done with NAND Flash and current controller and interface technologies," said Dr. Zvonimir Bandic, storage architecture manager for HGST Research.
The device was also shown at the 2014 Usenix conference on File and Storage Technologies. The read latency on emerging NVMs is about twice as fast as NAND Flash. HGST leveraged this information to develop an interface protocol that would enable the device to perform better, according to another report. Current state-of-the-art NVMe protocol doesn't pose a problem in regard to NAND Flash but it will not be adequate for NVMs, a new class of storage in data center environments.
The HGST Phase Change Memory (PCM) SSD will be exhibited and demonstrated at the 2014 Flash Memory Summit in the Santa Clara Convention Center on Aug. 6 and Aug. 7.
Last year, sTec unveiled its own enterprise-level PCIe-based solid-state drives at the VMworld Europe 2013 conference in Barcelona, Spain, according to a previous Tech Times report. HGST owns sTec and both are owned by Western Digital.
