Pliant announces 'world's fastest enterprise SSDs'

In the latest salvo of the enterprise SSD speed wars, Pliant Technology on Monday unveiled its first family of enterprise-ready solid state drives.

Offering "two to four times faster performance" and "10 times higher data reliability" than existing SSDs on the market, Pliant's Lightning drives sport software architecture and a proprietary ASIC controller design promising to improve performance and reliability while reducing cost and energy consumption.

Pliant says its Lightning EFDs, or enterprise flash drives, deliver "the industry's highest sustained performance with the most predictable performance profile across a wide range of read/write workloads."

Detailed performance specs, after the jump:

• Input/Output Per Second (IOPs) of 160,000 (LS) and 120,000 (LB)
• Read/write mix varying from 90 percent/10 percent to 60 percent/40 percent
• Data throughput (read/write): >525/340 MB/sec (LS) and >420/220 MB/sec (LB)
• User capacities: LS (3.5-inch) = 300GB and 150GB; LB (2.5-inch) = 150 GB
• Full duplex, fully independent, dual-port SAS interface
• Write cache-less design
• Unlimited writes
• End-to-end data protection and reliability: background Patrol Read and Memory Reclaim, extended ECC, triple-redundant ECC protected metadata, and support for the T10 Data Integrity Field (DIF) standard
• Industry-standard SLC NAND flash memory technology

The Lightning EFD family includes the Lightning LB and Lightning LS models,  designed around the standard 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch form factors, respectively, to integrate into existing Serial Attached SCSI enterprise storage and server systems without requiring modifications.

The Lightning LS300, LS150 and LB150 are being delivered for OEM evaluation and qualification, and will be available via authorized channel partners in September 2009.