From InfoWorld: Storage technologies much faster than NAND flash aren't expected to reach most smartphones and data centers for years, but preparations are already underway in order to make the most of them when they arrive.
Western Digital's HGST subsidiary is demonstrating one advance in that effort this week, showing what it calls the world's fastest SSD (solid-state drive) at the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, California.
The device, which can be plugged into a server's PCIe slot like any SSD, isn't a new storage product but a platform for demonstrating a low-latency interface that the company developed with future solid-state media in mind. It implemented the experimental communications protocol in a Linux driver on the server and in the SSD's embedded software.
The media at the heart of this SSD is PCM (phase change memory), an emerging technology that can make bits available to a host system many times more quickly than NAND flash can, according to Ulrich Hansen, HGST's vice president of SSD product marketing. Where NAND takes about 70 microseconds to respond to a request for data, PCM can do so in about 1 microsecond, he said. However, it will take two to three years of hardware development before PCM gets dense and cheap enough to compete head-on with flash, according to Hansen.
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