ecoINSITE

  • Search
You are here: Home / Storage / Pliant goes MLC for enterprise drives

Pliant goes MLC for enterprise drives

September 9, 2010 by Pedro Hernandez

Tweet

Are cheaper solid-0state storage arrays finally here? Pliant Technologies says yes.

The company is currently shipping its 2.5-inch, Serial Attached SCSI, MLC-based Lightning LB 200M (200 GB) and Lightning LB 400M (400 GB) enterprise solid-state drives (SSD) to OEMs for evaluation purposes. General availability is scheduled for October 2010. Pliant figures that energy-conscious IT shops will jump at low-power storage that offers 10,ooo input/output per second  (IOPs) of “sustained” performance for the LB 400M and over 8,000 for the LB 200M. Performance-wise, the company’s own SLC-based drives smokes the newer MLC variants despite performing roughly twice as fast as Pliant’s official, yet conservative, specs. Pricing, though not disclosed, will undoubtedly be cheaper than SLC-based drives.

MLC, or multi-level cell, NAND flash technology is less expensive than single-level cell — the current standard-bearer for enterprise-class drives — because it stores four states (2 bits) per cell versus SLC’s single bit approach. The trade-off is that MLC is more error prone, so it’s been largely relegated to consumer-level applications. But flash storage providers like Intel and Anobit have been making strides in improving error-correction, and thus, they can now offer MLC drives suitable for servers and storage arrays.

Now, if they find a way to close — or at least significantly narrow — the MLC-SLC performance gap, data center storage admins will really jump for joy.

Filed Under: Storage Tagged With: flash storage, MLC, multi-level cell, Pliant Technologies, single-level cell, SLC, solid-state drive, SSD, Storage

Recently…

  • Climate change highlights from Bill Gates’ 7th Reddit AMA
  • When solar sours the home buying experience
  • Watch: Nova’s Rise of the Superstorms
  • Microsoft’s green underwater datacenter project reaches phase 2
  • Earth Day 2018: Apple’s new robot recycler, Jane Goodall Google Doodle

Categories

  • Business
  • Cleantech & Renewable Energy
  • Cloud Computing
  • Company Profiles
  • Data Center
  • E-Waste & Recycling
  • ecoSocial
  • Environment
  • EVs & Green Transportation
  • Featured
  • Gadgets & Mobile
  • Green IT
  • Industry Voices
  • Living
  • Servers
  • Smart Grid
  • Stats & Figures
  • Storage
  • Uncategorized
  • Virtualization

Keeping good company

1E Blogs
TreeHugger
GreenBiz.com
NYT Environment
Inhabitat
Data Center Knowledge
Triple Pundit
SmartPlanet

About ecoINSITE

Visit the ecoINSITE.com About Page

This work by Pedro Hernandez is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Creative Commons License

ecoINSITE RSS Feed RSS Feed
Site Map

Alltop. Bribes work.

Nuts n’ Bolts

Powered by Wordpress
Supercharged by Genesis
Hosting by Linode

Social

Visit ecoINSITE’s Facebook Page
Follow us on Twitter @ecoINSITE
ecoINSITE on Google+

© 2025 · ecoINSITE