Super Talent Plans to Launch PCI Express-Based SSDs

Super Talent Technology Corp. plans to launch in June a new line of PCI Express-based solid-state drives (SSDs) for gamers, workstations, and servers.

The RAIDDrive will be available with up to 2 TB of storage in single-layer cell and multilayer cell flash memory. SLC is faster than the latter, but MLC offers more storage and costs less.

The RAIDDrives will connect to a computer through a PCI-e interface and will have read speed of up to 1.2 GB per second and a write speed up to 1.3 GB per second, according to Super Talent. As an optional feature, buyers can configure the drives for RAID 5 protection. RAID is a computer data storage scheme that can divide and replicate data among multiple drives.

RAIDDrives will be available in three lines: ES for servers, WS for workstations, and GS for gamers. The ES version is tailored for supporting compute-intensive applications, such as database transaction processing, business intelligence, and virtualization. WS is being offered to boost performance of systems used in animation, video editing, oil and gas exploration, computer-aided design, and scientific computing. For gamers, the SSD can "supercharge" their input/output subsystem, said Super Talent, which did not release pricing for the new products.

The company offers a RAIDSSD product line with IDE/PATA and SATA interfaces. The company competes with Violin Memory, Fusion-io, and Texas Memory Systems, which introduced its RamSan-20 Flash SSD on a card last month.Such devices are attractive because they hit an affordable price point for businesses -- typically less than $20,000 for about 400 GB to 500 GB of storage -- and the cards do not require a storage-area network.

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