BiTMICRO keeps it real, unveils 1.6TB Ultra320 SCSI SSD

One would think that after pushing out an 832GB SSD at CES, the mad scientists at BiTMICRO could afford some time off. Nevertheless, those same gurus have apparently been burning that midnight oil and today are announcing the world's first Ultra320 SCSI SSD to break the terabyte barrier. The E-Disk Altima E3S320 solid state flash disk arrives in a 3.5-inch form factor and houses some 1.6TB of storage space. Additionally, it promises sustained data transfer rates of up to 230MB/sec, and just in case the aforementioned model is just too capacious for you, the outfit will be shipping versions as small as 16GB in Q3 of this year. No word on how many houses you'll need to liquidate in order to take one home, however.

[Jeremy K. @ Feb 5th 2008 10:02AM]

'bout time... I'll take two.

[Gremlin @ Feb 5th 2008 10:53AM]

Honestly, I've been waiting for a 1.5 TB of 2TB HDD for long enough. It'll be another few millenniums before we see SSD at that size.

The Hitachi 1TB HDD began production like what? A year and a half ago? I haven't even herd rumblings of a larger HDD yet. So, hard drive industry, what gives?

[Superevil @ Feb 5th 2008 10:03AM]

"No word on how many houses you'll need to liquidate in order to take one home"

Couldn't have said it better myself.

[Dr. Evil @ Feb 5th 2008 3:28PM]

So I shouldn't expect to see this FAR @ Staples anytime soon?

[Celanor @ Feb 5th 2008 5:13PM]

Unfortunately, liquidating your home would take the whole part out about "taking one home"

[Tarnation @ Feb 5th 2008 10:04AM]

I picked my jaw up off the floor long enough to post. 1.6 Terrabytes "What was I thinking?" :) :D

[Poom @ Feb 5th 2008 10:33AM]

Me too... My jaw dropped for so long... OMG I want this so badly now... 1.6TB... (gets horny)

[Charlie Calhoun @ Feb 5th 2008 11:12AM]

*backs slowly away*

[skulldriveshaft @ Feb 5th 2008 6:02PM]

BOOM!

[creativefuzion @ Feb 5th 2008 10:04AM]

WOW! Now this is the kind of news I like to hear. Sign me up for one of these babies :)

[Scott Culp @ Feb 5th 2008 10:10AM]

I don't see the point. Something @ 32Gigs or so with a semi-disposable price maybe.

Isn't the limited number of write cycles for flash mem. still an issue? I can only see someone putting something this large in a server. In that environment after 2 years this will be garbage. ????

[Hooterman @ Feb 5th 2008 10:17AM]

Sure, but look how big their epenis is right now

[Jerry @ Feb 5th 2008 11:36AM]

Assuming the sustained transfer rate of 230MB/s is both read and write, then it would take roughly 116 minutes to write to that 1.6TB.

This SSD uses NAND flash, which has a typical endurance of 1000000 erase/write cycles. At a sustained rate of 230MB/s, it would take 220 years to write that 1.6TB a million times.

To add a touch of reality to these raw calculations, you will likely not have perfect write distribution, so some blocks will go through more cycles than others. But this pales to the converse side: You will never sustain maximum transfer rate for writes anywhere near that long, nor will you use it for writes only.

All together, even under constant heavy usage, this drive could outlive your grandchildren.

Write cycle durability still an issue? No.

[aardvark sandwich @ Feb 5th 2008 10:11AM]

Not unless you want in iphone the size of an external hard drive, requiring a power brick ^_^

[Todd @ Feb 5th 2008 10:16AM]

Ryan Block will put one in his MacBook Pro.

[Luigi193 @ Feb 5th 2008 11:02AM]

Or air...

[Flashpoint @ Feb 5th 2008 10:28AM]

I would expect the price of a drive like this to be somewhere around $30,000. Of course, I doubt anyone could rely on this since the technology is so new...and at these prices, they are only good for business backup solutions.

I'd be happy with a 10 GB NAND Drive and a 100 GB HDD in a computer. Just use the Nand to run games

[w00t @ Feb 5th 2008 10:40AM]

Yeah I was thinking about a similar setup. A smallish and affordable SSD for the OS and most used applications and cheap capacious hard drives for everything else.

Most of the time I'm waiting for the drives to stop churning is os files and swapping which would go on the SSD. I'm not too fussed about the speed of moving all my war.. po... large generic and totally legal files about :)

[Kamokazi @ Feb 5th 2008 10:31AM]

SCSI 320??

Why the heck not SAS?

[w00t @ Feb 5th 2008 10:36AM]

Wow... I want 4 of these on RAID-0!

I was thinking perhaps I could rob a bank to afford it, but in all seriousness I doubt that will be enough :D

[Brodie @ Feb 5th 2008 10:48AM]

Just for competitions sake, BiTMICRO should release this for $100 and make everyone play catch up real quick...

[Scott Neary @ Feb 5th 2008 11:30AM]

AMEN BROTHA

[Tarnation @ Feb 5th 2008 10:59AM]

@Flashpoint
@Scott Culp

You must not understand the concept of innovation. New products like this help boost the tech. It doesn't matter if it can only be afforded by the Ultra rich and the server market it is still awesome beyond belief. It is a challenge to all the SSD drive manufacturers to get off their bums and get to work. I don't care if 32GB SSD is fast than mechanical hardrive 32GB is not enough storage for anything other than laptops and mp3 players.

@Kamokazi

SCSI is still the dominant server drive connector. That is where this is aimed.

[Flashpoint @ Feb 5th 2008 11:07AM]

32 GB...even 20 GB is more than enough for specific situations. If you are setting up Internet Browsers in a school or laptops/desktops for education and business purposes, 20 GB is just fine. You are talking about people who need huge HDD's for downloading music and videos. In many circumstances, users aren't even allowed to do that. 10 GB is well more than enough for education purposes - using Microsoft Office to create documents and even powerpoints.

[saq @ Feb 5th 2008 11:08AM]

Actually SCSI has been pretty much completely dropped in favor of SAS. All current generation HP, Dell, and IBM are all SAS/SATA only with SCSI nowhere to be found. The only place SCSI drives are found right now are legacy external disk chassis, and those have all been succeeded by SAS chassis of a similar formfactor.

[Tarnation @ Feb 5th 2008 11:21AM]

New servers have SAS yes but there are still tons of servers already out there with SCSI in them. I am sure if they can integrate the tech into the drives they will. Besides the type of server this will be aimed at is the file server/database market. The key here is size. Once other companies aim for this kind of size you will start seeing different form factors for competition. Right now this is one of a kind so there is no since in trying to please everybody, just look at the Apple market scheme they drive away as many people as they attract with their products (MBA anyone).

[Scott Culp @ Feb 5th 2008 11:42AM]

Just because something CAN be done does not mean it SHOULD. This in no way challenges anyone. Noone who truly understands the tech. will buy this.

As Hooterman so appropriately put it, it's about the e-penis. Pointless.

[Tacticus @ Feb 5th 2008 2:44PM]

Scott sorry to say this but it's not for you
It's for the DBA who has a frakking big DB that needs ultra low seek times

[Mikey @ Feb 5th 2008 11:02AM]

Capacity keeps going up, up, up... I want to know when price will go down down down...

[atz6975 @ Feb 5th 2008 11:29AM]

They released scsi over sas so no one could try it :0

[Allen @ Feb 5th 2008 1:15PM]

No, they released it with SCSI because 1) people understand it and 2) they never intended to actually sell it. It says right in the article that 16 gig versions will ship, not this one. The 16 gig versions will land on SCSI because SCSI interfaces are readily available to adapt server drives like this to consumer motherboards. There is not a single MOBO I know of that ships with SAS or SCSI on it, so to use either you will need to adapt to SATA.

[techieguru16 @ Feb 5th 2008 1:59PM]

i hope that the price for SSD gets cheaper. *sigh* it is so much better than HDD. lol :)

[Tacticus @ Feb 5th 2008 2:42PM]

http://www.tyan.com/product_board_detail.aspx?pid=163 8 sas ports on board
or how about a nice intel board with onboard scsi
http://www.intel.com/design/servers/boards/s5000vsa/

so in under 1 min i grabbed 2 boards with scsi and sas onboard i guess you never really looked

[tacticus @ Feb 5th 2008 2:44PM]

This is meant to be a reply to Allen

[Bill @ Feb 5th 2008 2:47PM]

Now we just need it in a 2.5", 9.5mm high SATA package.

1.8", 5mm tall would be even better. :)

[Brian @ Feb 5th 2008 2:51PM]

Any chance this thing will be available for under 25,000 USD?

Seriously, if this thing sells for 10k, it should drop the prices of 16/32gb drives considerably.

[Ian @ Feb 5th 2008 3:23PM]

hey engadget, you know what I would love for my birthday, seriously, that is soooooooooooooooooo nice!

[Tech^Cellfish @ Feb 5th 2008 4:26PM]

Still 100k or 10k writecycles? MLC or SLC? I want something that lasts for someone who has a massive changing library of 30-20gb hd movies

[Matt Piekunka @ Feb 5th 2008 4:57PM]

Wow. I can't even imagine the price, but this is sweet!

[dish @ Feb 5th 2008 7:16PM]

OMG this would be the last storage device I would ever need!!!

[Negativecool @ Feb 5th 2008 8:35PM]

Funny, I said that 8 years ago when I bought my ultra fast 1GHz computer with the enormously spacious and future proof 60GB hard drive before I went off to college.

[Hoystory @ Feb 6th 2008 4:24AM]

I could use two. But I think we're probably still 3 or 4 years away before these things become cheap enough to stick in a notebook.

Question: Are spinning platters always going to be with us, or are they going the way of the floppy?

[Ed @ Feb 6th 2008 5:10AM]

I expect to be low ranked for this, since it does not overflow with joy and the "I can haz pleaze?"

This is the same old bullshit. Same shit, different container.

I looked for the specs again on the website and what a coincidence, they don't say write speeds and read speeds, just a "sustained" speed.

Ultra320 Scsi? Nice. No problem there.

Shitty write speeds that make it impractical for anything but read-only type operational environments?

TOTAL LETDOWN, hidden under the rug, forgotten about when marketing to the gamer community.

Until write speeds are more then a very small fraction of read speeds on SSD, they will continue to be a novel 1st gen component.

[Alan @ Feb 6th 2008 9:27AM]

Number one: I like the way the story was posted. Liquidating housing to buy it. I found it funny.

Number two: I almost got to play with a 64 GB ssd. Dell sells it with one of the XPS system. My client did not buy it because it was to small for him. Now they push this out. Can't wait for the release.