Storage disk with phase-change memory

Researchers at the University of California in San Diego have developed a prototype disk drive based on phase-change memory. Full details over here.

A new type of data storage technology, called phase-change memory, has proven capable of writing some types of data faster than conventional flash based storage. The tests used a hard drive based on prototype phase-change memory chips.

Disks based on solid-state, flash memory chips are increasingly used in computers and servers because they perform faster than conventional magnetic hard drives. The performance of the experimental phase-change disk drive, created by researchers at University of California San Diego, suggests that it won't be long before that technology is able to give computing devices another speed boost.

"Phase-change chips are not quite ready for prime time, but if the technology continues to develop, this is what [solid state drives] will look like in the next few years," says Steve Swanson, who built the prototype, known as Onyx, with colleagues. It had a data capacity of eight gigabytes and went head-to-head with what Swanson calls a "high-end" 80 GB flash drive made for use in servers.

When it came to writing small chunks of data on the order of kilobytes in size, Onyx was between 70 percent and 120 percent faster than the commercial drive. At the same time, the prototype placed significantly less computational load on the processor of the computer using it. It was also much faster at reading data than the flash drive when accessing blocks of data of any size. The kind of large volume, small read and write patterns that Onyx excelled at are a hallmark of the type of calculations involved in analyzing social networks like those of Twitter, says Swanson. However, Onyx was much slower at writing larger chunks of data than its commercially established competitor.

OCZ announces RevoDrive Hybrid PCI Express (PCIe) storage solution - 08/31/2011 04:15 PM
Well, it's official. We already reported about this product back at Computex and hope to receive the first samples in two maybe three weeks. OCZ Technology announced the release of the RevoDrive Hybri...

eBay goes SSD and cuts storage power consumption by 78 percent - 08/04/2011 09:47 AM
eBay switched 100TB of HDD-based storage to SSD and saw impressive gains in performance and power efficiency: EBay ended up replacing 100TB of HDD-based storage in a single year with the SSD-based st...

WD enters SMB market with small office storage servers - 07/13/2011 09:47 AM
Western Digital announced small office storage servers and has signed an OEM software agreement with Microsoft Corporation to include the Windows

Thecus D0204 Portable USB 3.0 Storage Device - 07/01/2010 08:55 AM
Thecus Technology is proud to announce its first portable storage device featuring the new USB 3.0 standard - the D0204. With massive storage capacity in a tiny package no larger than a paperback book...

Corsair Expands Storage Line with 512 GB SSD - 02/03/2010 05:19 PM
High-capacity SSDs are few in number due to the tremendous pricetage, none the less Corsair will intro a 512 GB Performance Series rather soon. Very little info is available just yet but it seems that...