Intel and Hitachi announced in press releases today that they are partnering up to build Intel NAND flash-memory based solid-state drives (SSDs):

The combination of a leading Enterprise drive supplier with a NAND technology and manufacturing leader will produce world-class solutions in terms of reliability, performance and system compatibility. The two companies will work together exclusively to deliver enterprise SSDs with SAS and FC interfaces, with the first products expected to be available in early 2010.

I’m all for the idea of decreasing hard drive I/O wait time – especially the time it takes for drives to seek data on the disk – but I’m also a little weary of a drive that could randomly lose a whole chunk of data without any possibility of recovery.  At least when a standard magnetic-based drive dies, you’ve got some possibility of data recovery through an expensive drive recovery service.  If a chip blows in your SSD, you’re toast.

I suppose one could mitigate that risk with a RAID-1+0 array, but that’d be mega expensive considering the current and probable future prices of SSDs – at least for us ordinary folks.

Filed under: General