DDRdrive - a Hybrid PCI-E x1 Solid-State Drive

Interesting, the folks from a company called DDRdrive LLC introduced their DDRdrive X1.

pretty much this is a PCI-Express expansion card featuring a complete solid-state storage system designed for IOPS intensive tasks. The DDRdrive X1 is a PCIe Gen 1-based hybrid SSD, that combines 4 GB of DDR memory and 4 GB of NAND flash memory -- hence hybrid.

Both solid-state technologies work in concert to provide the superior characteristics of DRAM (speed, reliability, and longevity) with the NAND part used for backups. In terms of read/write speeds, the DDRdrive X1 is not that spectacular. Limited by the PCIe x1 interface it can "only" do about 250 MB/s in reads and 155 MB/s in writes. But it's the Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS), where X1 really shines.

A single drive can hit 300,000+ IOPS Random 512B Reads and 200,000+ IOPS Random 512B Writes. That's a massive bump in operation speed compared to practically all other solid-state drives currently in production. For comparison Fusion IO's enterprise drives are estimated at 200,000 IOPS 512B read, while other consumer SSDs are rated at about 100,000 IOPS 512B read. And those 300,000+ IOPS can be achieved with a maximum power draw of only 9.91 Watts. DDRdrive X1 can also be configured to work in striped (performance) RAID 0, mirrored RAID 1, or RAID 5 regimes.

The DDRdrive X1 is shipping now for $1495 with a 5 year limited warranty. For more information, please be sure to check this page here.