Hard drives are all about how much you can store and how quickly you can store it. And this soon-to-be-unveiled phase-change memory drive is expected to up the ante quite a bit.
Students and faculty from UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering are getting ready to show off their newest SSD, “Moneta.” But Moneta isn’t just another solid state drive. Instead it’s a phase-change memory (PCM) SSD, which stores data using a metal alloy called chalcogenide and, according to its makers, performs seven times faster than any flash-based SSD currently available. Which, you don’t need me to tell you, would be pretty damn fast.
To store data, the PCM drive uses a heat application through a current to switch the alloy between two states – crystalline and amorphous. Reading data entails using a smaller current to determine what state the alloy is in. The drive supposedly reads at 327MB/s and writes at 91MB/s, but we’ll probably have to wait til after it’s unveiled (at DAC 2011) to see how it fares with user testing. And I wouldn’t expect that to happen anytime soon since it’s likely this sorta thing won’t be available for us to play with for some time. [UCSD]
Lip
Saturday, June 4, 2011 at 3:14 PMI have an SSD that can do 500MB/s on SATA 3 (OCZ Vertex 3) – the speeds you have quoted aren’t even matching existing SSDs let alone 7x faster?
Anonymous
Sunday, June 5, 2011 at 11:58 AMProbably missing a zero. 3270MB/s
Nodeity
Sunday, June 5, 2011 at 9:17 AMThe picture looks Ram Dimms? So is it an SSD or Ram?
Ben
Sunday, June 5, 2011 at 9:58 AMWhever wrote this summary didn’t actually read the original article linked.
“Moneta uses Micron Technology’s first-generation PCM chips and can read large sections of data at a maximum rate of 1.1 gigabytes per second and write data at up to 371 megabytes per second. For smaller accesses (e.g., 512 B), Moneta can read at 327 megabytes per second and write at 91 megabytes per second”
Leroy
Tuesday, June 7, 2011 at 1:36 AMThose are ssd dimms