Super Talent, a leading supplier of memory and flash products, has announced a series of one of the largest solid-state drives (SSDs) in the world. The new RAIDDrive SSDs will be aimed at gaming personal computers, servers and workstations, however, their pricing is more than likely to be rather enormous.

“RAIDDrive SSDs are a quantum leap ahead of existing SSDs in sequential transfer speeds due to our RAID architecture combined with the latest in flash technology and the bandwidth of the PCI Express interface. RAIDDrive shatters previous storage system bottlenecks and sets a new standard in performance,” said CH Lee, chief operating officer of Super Talent.

Super Talent’s RAIDDrive supports sequential read speeds of up to 1.4GB/s and sequential write speeds of up to 1.20GB/s. The RAIDDrive – which operates flash memory chips in RAID mode to boost performance – features 1GB of DRAM cache and utilizes PCI Express 2.0 x8 interface. Performance of the new RAIDDrive is even higher than maximum speed of OCZ Technology’s Z-Drive (up to 500MB/s read speed and up to 470MB/s write speed).

SuperTalent is releasing three families of RAIDDrives with features optimized for different market segments:

• RAIDDrive ES is aimed at enterprise servers performing compute intensive applications such as database transaction processing, business intelligence, and virtualization. RAIDDrive ES can be factory configured as RAID 0 or RAID 5, and fits in a 3U rack mount chassis. A battery backup module for the ES protects data in the event of a power loss. Built using SLC flash for high endurance, RAIDDrive ES is available in capacities up to 1TB.
• RAIDDrive WS is designed for workstation users performing tasks including animation, video editing, oil and gas exploration, CAD/EDA simulation, and scientific computing. RAIDDrive WS can be factory configured as RAID 0 or RAID 5. The WS uses SLC flash and is offered in capacities up to 1TB.
• RAIDDrive GS is targeted at gamers and enthusiasts looking to supercharge their IO subsystem. RAIDDrive GS can be factory configured as RAID 0 or RAID 5, uses MLC flash and is available in capacities up to 2TB.

Higher capacity RAIDDrive models use the RAIDDrive Expander – a separate PCIe card – to hold a total of eight SATA SSDs.

RAIDDrive SSDs are available to OEMs and system integrators directly from Super Talent. OEM pricing for the 1TB RAIDDrive GS is $4999. The price of higher capacity and/or SLC flash-based SSDs could be too high not only for gamers, but also for workstation users. According to Jon Peddie Research market research firm, average selling price of a workstation was just $1929 in Q2 2009, therefore, $4999 or higher price point for a data storage device is very high even for workstation market.

Tags: Super Talent, SSD, RAIDDrive