The announcement of an 832-GB Solid State Drive (SSD) in a 2.5-inch form factor by BitMicro is yet another milepost in the arena of rapidly developing SSD technologies.

No, rotating media will not become toast any time soon, according to Marius Tudor, director of business development at BitMicro, but the extraordinary advantages compared to rotating media – particularly with regard to lower power consumption, far higher random I/O speeds, far higher immunity to shock and vibration — mean that the SSD is becoming highly attractive in an ever-growing number of applications in both the military and the enterprise markets. In the military arena, any design that is field-deployable — planes, trucks, helicopters — and in the enterprise domain, data-based servers are likely candidates for an SSD.

BitMicro's new Altima SSD will be able to sustain rates of 100-MB to 240-MB per second and 20,000 and 55,000 IO per second depending on interface. The 832-GB SATA offers 3.0-Gb/s support and hot pluggable capabilities for personal computing as well as military and enterprise applications.

Though Tudor anticipates that 80% of all environmentally- or performance-challenged applications will eventually follow the SSD path, rotating drives will survive. He points out that in the 1990s it was thought that the rotating hard drive would totally supplant the tape drive, but it has not happened. Tape was simply pushed lower on the food chain.

The earlier versions of SSD were the Single-Level Cell (SLC). They were followed by the introduction of the Multi-Level Cell (MLC) that provides a significantly higher density per footprint. However, at present MLCs have a shorter life span with regard to writes — compared to SLCs.

The declining cost of flash memory, coupled with rising SSD densities is enabling SSD implementation in the personal computing market. Though Dell, Samsung and others have introduced Laptops with SSD drives, the additional cost — on the order of $500 — has been a severe obstacle to sales.

Hard drive prices today are approximately $1 per GB, but SSDs both the SLC and the MLC versions, have a way to go before they can become competitive with regard to price.

BitMicro will begin sampling the E2A3GM, which is its 832-GB SSD, in the second quarter of this year.

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