EMC plans to introduce a line of solid-state drives using flash memory as an option to replace some disk drives in the company’s high-end Symmetrix storage arrays, a company spokesman said Monday.
EMC will offer solid-state drives with capacities of 73GB and 146GB said Abhrajit Bhattacharjee, an EMC spokesman in Singapore. The drives, which will ship this quarter, will only be available as an option with Symmetrix storage arrays, and will not be available with other products, he said.
Pricing for the solid-state drives was not immediately available, but using four 73GB solid-state drives to replace four of the 146GB hard disk drives in a Symmetrix 100-disk array would increase the cost by less than 10 per cent compared to a comparable system using only hard disk drives, Bhattacharjee said.
Solid-state drives use memory chips instead of magnetic platters to store information. These types of drives are generally faster and consume less power than traditional disk drives, but they are also significantly more expensive.
The solid-state drives are aimed at customers willing to pay a premium for the significantly faster response times these drives offer, Bhattacharjee said.
EMC plans to use single-cell flash memory in its solid-state drives, which will allow for higher performance but costs more than multicell flash memory.
