Flash Storage Device Delivers 300k Ops/s Using DDR2 RAM

June 11, 2009

Untitled Document Looking for some really fast nonvolatile storage? DDRdrive delivers doubledata- rate (DDR) performance with NAND nonvolatility. Its DDRdrive X1 adds an FPGA between a PCI Express Gen 1...

William G. Wong

Looking for some really fast nonvolatile storage? DDRdrive delivers doubledata- rate (DDR) performance with NAND nonvolatility. Its DDRdrive X1 adds an FPGA between a PCI Express Gen 1 interface, 4 Gbytes of DDR2 memory, and 4 Gbytes of NAND flash (see the figure). The FPGA handles all transactions including backup from RAM to flash.

The RAM provides the highthroughput characteristics. It’s essentially a full-size cache for the NAND storage. A full backup from RAM to flash takes 60 seconds. Incremental backup is much faster.

The full-height, half-length board plugs into a standard PCI Express x1 slot. A Windows device driver provides a low-overhead interface to storage. A Linux driver is in the works. Operating-system software-based spanning or redundant array of disks (RAID) support can take advantage of multiple X1s in the same system.

Maximum power consumption is 9.91 W. Average power draw is under 5 W. Pricing starts at $1495. An external power supply can be connected to a UPS.

DDRDRIVEwww.ddrdrive.com

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

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