Bitmicro developing 1.6TB solid state disk.

Flash specialist Bitmicro has announced that it is developing 3.5in. Flash disks with a capacity of 1.6TB, larger than any current rotating disk drives. The solid state drives use Single-level cell (SLC) NAND Flash chips, which are lower density than multi-level cell chips, but have faster access speeds. The manufacturer promises transfer speeds of up to 230MB/s for its E-Disk Altima series - although it is not clear whether this applies to both read or write speeds, or both.

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The disks come with either SAS or fibre channel interfaces, and will be able to process 55,000 I/O operations per second, according to Bitmicro. The company is also offering U320 SCSI and Serial ATA versions, but these only manage 30,000 and 20,000 I/O operations per second respectively. The drives should be on the market from September. Pricing information has not been revealed.

(ehe)