News

posted on 15 May 2008 09:35

STEC, the supplier of flash solid state drives (SSD) to EMC, has announced an ultra-moble PC SSD at the other end of the scale.

Patrick Wilkison, marketing and business development VP at STEC, put the annuncement in this context: "STEC's core technology around high reliability and high performance solid state drives enables us to meet the storage requirements of new product categories that range from the Enterprise storage to notebook computing products. By leveraging our innovative, proprietary controller technology we can deliver unrivaled performance and reliability at extremely low prices -- making low-cost SSD storage a reality for cost-sensitive applications.'

STEC reckons existing UM-PC SSDs are low capacity, have poor controllers, poor performance and low reliability. It reckons it's brought its enterprise flash SSD capabilities to the UM-PC space, and says its UM-PC SSD has:-

- Multi-level cell (MLC) design giving it capacities of 4. 8,16 and 32GB with 64GB coming in the first quarter of next year,
- 4-channel controller,
- Performance (sustained sequential speeds) -- 55MB/sec read speeds, 25MB/sec write speeds
- Reliability: Full datapath protection, advanced static and dynamic wear-leveling, power-loss data protection, strong 8-bit error correction capabilities,
- SATA and PATA/IDE (UDMA 6)interfaces

The UM-PC SSD's dimensions are 50.95mm(L) x 30.0mm(W) x 2.4mm(T) and it is compatible with all ultra mobile PCs.

STEC reckons that its drive is thus faster and more reliable than existing UM-PC SSD products and a 'compelling alternative' to hard disk drives. The products are sampling now and expected to be in mass production by July.

EMC apparently has an exclusion clause in its contract with STEC that could prevent STEC supplying flash SSds to EMC competitors.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}