In a video posted on a blog that has recently opened, Micron carries out the demo on a storage system based on two PCI-Express cards with SLC NAND flash chips managed on 16 channels, all reaching a speed of not less than 800 MB/s. In time, Micron will integrate this on one board that can manage 1 GB/s, with a random read of 200 000 I/Os per second. Of course, a product of this type is designed primarily for servers and isn't likely to hit the market place before 2010 as it is still at prototype stage.
And of course PCI-Express SSDs are no innovation. Indeed, Fusion-io announced its ioDrive back in 2007 and it will be available in a few months. In the 80 GB version, it already works at a read speed of 700 MB/s with an I/O of 102 000 I/O on 4 KB blocks. The only thing is it will cost thousands of $ and even if the the arrival of the Micron should bring about a reduction in price, the target market is the same and the Micron will certainly not be cheap.
Even in the long term, nothing indicates that desktop SSDs will go onto PCI-Express. True, a 4x slot with a PCI-Express 2.0 gives 2 GB/s bandwidth but the classic SSDs are a long way off this. Of course, the 300 MB/s transfer rate max on the SATA 3.0 Gbits/s could well be reached over the next 12 months, but the 3.0 version of the SATA standard, enabling an expansion to 600 MB/s, should be finalised in the same timeframe.
