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Start-up Pliant claims to have secret for speedier SSDs

Fledgling storage firm Pliant Technologies has thrown off its startup invisibility cloak, and claims it can greatly improve the performance of Flash-based solid state drives. Pliant said this week it received $8m in first round funding funding, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, to develop a "new class" of SSDs for big business …

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Posted Thursday 21st February 2008 22:10 GMT

E

Nifty

I hope it will successfully make it to market.

Would a SATA or SCSI/SAS/etc interface be able to keep up with such a device?

Posted Friday 22nd February 2008 08:39 GMT

Alexander Hanff

Consumer Market?

Coat

"Because of the architecture that we use, the drive doesn't add any significant cost over traditional high-end flash drives"

This means we can get a 4GB for about 40 quid then eh? Forgive my scepticism but I suspect they will be 1000s of £/$ each despite their admission that they are almost as cheap to manufacture as flash drives.

Posted Friday 22nd February 2008 08:39 GMT

Anonymous Coward

not just the IO interface

Coat

If you think about the chain of components that make up the IO stack, then ultra fast drives is going to challenge a lot more than just the SATA/SCSI/FC interface.

A 4Gb FC interface to a host can only really sustain 340MB/s - which, if these things deliver as they claim, means you wont need more than a very few to saturate that bus. Even 10Gb only pushes it out the way a little.

But imagine how your TB class DB could perform will all the redo logs on these babies, with multiple load balanced 10Gb channels

oh lordy - sticky at the thought.

Posted Friday 22nd February 2008 08:43 GMT

Steve

puzzled

Paris Hilton

Isn't the limit on flash based SSD's down to the physical speed of flash memory, rather than any controller issues?

Paris, because she has a much of a clue to the answer as I do at the moment.

Posted Friday 22nd February 2008 10:01 GMT

Bronek Kozicki

@Steve

yes, but one can balance reads and, especially, writes, across multiple chips. The more chips you have and the better logic to balance writes, the bettter potential performance improvement.

Posted Friday 22nd February 2008 10:40 GMT

Anonymous Coward

Patent application from the founders

Anonymous Coward

A patent application from two co-founders of Pliant, Olbrich (CTO) and Prins (Chief Architect), can be found by Googling for USPTO Application #: 20070294468 "Architecture for reading and writing to flash memory"

Not exactly earth shattering - use of multiple processors between a DDR RAM buffer and flash devices. [sarcasm] I wonder why that hasn't been thought of before?[/sarcasm]

Posted Friday 22nd February 2008 11:41 GMT

Chris C

re: Consumer Market?

Are you actually saying that you consider a 4GB Sandisk/PNY/whatever USB flash-based memory stick to be a "high-end flash drive"? If so, then please cover yourself in foil so we can identify you. By "high-end flash drive", he's talking about actual SSDs, not flash-based memory sticks. I would assume he means something with 128GB+ capacity, and something with an actual drive interface (FC, SAS, SCSI, SATA, etc), which currently cost $3000+.

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