Storage Vision 2012 Report: Micron/Crucial, Intel and Toshiba
Prior to the start of the CES 2012 show in Las Vegas this week, major players in the storage industry kicked off their mini conference, in an effort to get the buzz going early in consumer and enterprise storage. Of course Micron and Crucial were there in force to show us their latest SSD technologies, starting with their big, bad P320h PCI Express SSD.
Micron P320h PCI Express SSD
If you recall, the product is a co-development effort between Micron and IDT that sports a new Flash memory controller ASIC for direct-attached SSD storage over a X8 PCI Express Gen 2 link. Micron didn't have the drive up and running, though it was on display. Supposedly Micron is sampling customers right now and they hope to move to production sometime within the first half of this year.
Micron C400 Self-Encrypted SSD
Micron gave us a quick nickle booth tour as well, covering their Self-Encrypted C400SSD, new mSATA products and, of course, their 6Gbps SATA M4 drive.
Three terabytes over a USB 3.0 connection definitely sounds tasty and it's good to see more USB 3.0 products coming to market to help make use of these new ports coming to laptops and desktops lately.
Finally, Intel was demoing their upcoming Cherryville Intel 520 Series SSD showing the performance of the product versus a standard hard drive.
Micron P320h PCI Express SSD
If you recall, the product is a co-development effort between Micron and IDT that sports a new Flash memory controller ASIC for direct-attached SSD storage over a X8 PCI Express Gen 2 link. Micron didn't have the drive up and running, though it was on display. Supposedly Micron is sampling customers right now and they hope to move to production sometime within the first half of this year.
Micron C400 Self-Encrypted SSD
Micron gave us a quick nickle booth tour as well, covering their Self-Encrypted C400SSD, new mSATA products and, of course, their 6Gbps SATA M4 drive.
Finally, a big focus for Crucial is their new Adrenaline SSD cache solution. This technology will employ an easy setup in software for any new or legacy chipset/motherboard platform (Windows 7 only currently) and offer a significant performance boost for any standard hard drive of any capacity. The Adrenaline drive is set at 50GB capacity for caching and will come out soon in Q1. We're hoping to put it to the test versus Intel's SRT caching technology on their Z68 and 7 series chipset solutions.
Interestingly enough, Toshiba also decided to roll out their own brand of consumer storage products to complement the OEM offering that they've had on the market for some time now. In addition to their bare drives ranging up to 3TB, they were also showing some rather interesting external drive products.
Three terabytes over a USB 3.0 connection definitely sounds tasty and it's good to see more USB 3.0 products coming to market to help make use of these new ports coming to laptops and desktops lately.
Finally, Intel was demoing their upcoming Cherryville Intel 520 Series SSD showing the performance of the product versus a standard hard drive.
Of course it was fast. Reportedly the product is driven by a SandForce SF-2200 series SSD controller, so in excess of 500MB/s for read/write throughput is to be expected.
That's about it for our Storage Vision 2012 coverage. Stay tuned for more this week at CES 2012, almost live, (half dead?) from sunny Las Vegas.
That's about it for our Storage Vision 2012 coverage. Stay tuned for more this week at CES 2012, almost live, (half dead?) from sunny Las Vegas.
