Toshiba SSD creeps into an SAS

Showing the expansion of the use of flash memory into enterprise hardware, Toshiba said it was developing a solid-state drive using a SCSI (SAS) interface, making it suitable for high-performance enterprise storage.

Flash memory is solid state, is faster than traditional memory, uses less power, and produces less heat. But although it's earned a bad reputation lately among foundries for being cheap, compared to DRAM, it typically has been more expensive -- at least by the gigabyte -- and thus far it's been used primarily in laptops. On the other hand, servers that take less power and produce less heat could save data centers a lot of money.

The 2.5-inch form factor drives, which will store up to 100 GB, will for reliability include dual-ported SAS redundancy (i.e., if one link fails there'll still be another one) and non-volatile cache (i.e., if the power goes out, your data won't go with it).

The company said that samples of the drives would be available late in the first quarter, with mass production in the second quarter, but did not reveal a price.