Sun Microsystems and Samsung have been working together on enterprise-grade flash for the past few months, and they've now announced the fruit of their labor: single-level-cell NAND memory with several times the endurance of regular SLC flash.
According to Samsung, the new 8Gb memory chips can withstand five times more write-erase cycles than their vanilla SLC brethren, and they can process 100 times more transfers per watt than mechanical hard drives. Sun and Samsung think solid-state drives based on these chips will be useful for applications like video streaming and search engines, where servers typically need to handle lots of data transactions.
Sun flash technologist Michael Cornwell says his company plans to incorporate the new high-endurance flash in its server and storage products. The two companies see a future in the endeavor, too: Samsung quotes research firm IDC as saying worldwide enterprise SSD shipments will hit 2.24 million in 2012.
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