Three years after announcing its plans, merchant supplier Silicon Motion has begun shipping its 128TB Solid State Disks (SSD) Reference Design Kit (RDK) aimed at maximizing the performance and efficiency in AI tool workloads.
Silicon Motion is best known as a designer of NAND flash drive controllers and the RDK is built on the MonTitan PCIe Gen 5 platform that utilizes the latest 2TB QLC NAND die. It features advanced firmware to maximize performance and efficiency in AI tool workloads.
The MonTitan RDK is designed for enterprise data center use and Silicon Motion says its sequential read speeds exceed 14 GB/s, ranking among the fastest external SSDs, with random read performance of over 3.3 million IOPS, a respectable throughput rate.
The kit utilizes the PCIe Dual Ported enterprise-grade SM8366 controller with support for PCIe Gen 5 x4 NVMe 2.0 and OCP 2.5 data center specifications. The 128TB SSD RDK also supports NVMe 2.0 Flexible Data Placement (FDP), a feature that allows advanced data management and improved SSD write efficiency and endurance.
“Silicon Motion’s MonTitan SSD RDK offers a comprehensive solution for our customers, enabling them to rapidly develop and deploy enterprise-class SSDs tailored for AI data center and edge server applications.” said Alex Chou, senior vice president of the enterprise storage & display interface solution business at Silicon Motion.
Silicon Motion doesn’t make drives, rather it makes reference design kits in different form factors that its customers use to build their own product. Its kits come in E1.S, E3.S, and U.2 form factors. The E1.S and U.2 forms mirror the M.2, which looks like a stick of gum and installs on the motherboard. There are PCI Express enclosures that hold four to six of those drives and plug into one card slot and appear to the system as a single drive.
E3.S is a 2.5 inch form similar to the SATA drives found in PCs, but they use a PCIe interface and are stacked vertically in a 2U server.
Until now, hard drives it had two advantages over SSD: one, capacity — the HDD had a great deal more capacity per device that an SSD — and two, cost. An 8TB HDD is considerably cheaper than an 8TB SSD. MonTitan takes away the capacity advantage; the highest capacity HED right now is 24 TB.
Pricing was not announced though high-capacity SSDs are typically expensive. Solidigm’s 30TB SSD sells for $3,360 retail, while two Western Digital 16TB HDDs sell for less than $600.
The company competes with Samsung, Western Digital, Micron and others.
Source:: Network World