New Controller Allows for 5TB Solid State Drives

A common problem with current SSDs, or rather nuisance, is their limitation of 1TB storage. Sage Microelectronics has developed a new controller chip that will allow for drives with up to 5TB capacity. According to the company, the chips are already shipping in volumes so new products with this chip might be on the not-so-distant horizon.

If this sounds too good to be true, it might be. There are some things to take into consideration with this new Controller. While current SSD controllers work directly with individual flash chips, the new Sage S68x will use SD, MMC and eMMC modules instead. It has 10 parallel channels that can host four flash modules each. Using this method with 128GB modules (10 x 4 x 128) would create a first 5TB SSD.

The setup resembles a layered RAID0 setup and there is no mention of any redundancy or failover. This raises the concern of what happens if one of the modules in the array fails on you. The second catch is that drives based on this controller will run on the SATA2 interface with speeds of just 260MB/s reads and 225MB/s writes.

Not mentioned in the release was the other Sage Microelectronics controller chip listed in the product portfolio, the S88x controller. It is designed for the PCI Express 2 bus and will allow for up to SATA3 speeds.

Thanks to TechReport for providing us with this information

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