Introduction

In July of 2008 we published the first State of Solid State article. In it we talked about products that were on the horizon, pricing and where we thought the market was headed. Looking back, even I am surprised at how accurate the article was and how long the information was valid for. Like all things in this industry, eventually all things become dated, so it is time to make some new predictions, look at emerging technologies and even make some suggestions to the companies that are offering products to the masses.

It is an exciting time for the storage industry. The introduction of consumer level SSDs is only part of what has been a year of great invention. SATA and SAS 6Gb/s will open the data highways and give us twice the available point to point bandwidth. At the same time, companies like LSI have introduced PCIe 2.0 RAID controllers that provide twice the available bandwidth to the system allowing enterprise, prosumer and enthusiasts to take advantage of new, higher speed products like Seagate's 15K.7 and 15K.2 2.5 inch form factor drive. To date, these are the only two products that we have tested that make use of the 6Gb/s SAS interface and are limited by SAS 3Gb/s.

Today we are going to talk about some of the technology advancements and get into some of the actual products that are currently hush-hush, but information is starting to leak out about. To round everything out, we are also going to get into some of the pricing predictions since the perceived high cost of SSDs has been such a tough wall to climb for many.