Solid state drives – new form factor coming
Adam Leventhal just blogged about a new form factor for solid state drives that will be announced soon called the ‘Open Flash Module’. From the picture, it looks like the form-factor is based around SO-DIMM (commonly used in laptops). I’m excited to see this since the most common form factor now is 2.5 inch or 3.5 inch drives that connect to SATA/SAS/SCSI/FC bays, which is great for compatibility (physical form-factor as well as drivers), but is a huge waste of potential density. The new form-factor should allow you to have much greater density and boost bandwidth/reduce latency compared to current implementations. One thing I am curious about though is the ability to hot-plug a form-factor like this which seems like it will be plugging straight in to a motherboard.
Update: Sun just posted more information about it here. Initial capacity will be 24G with a 64M DRAMM buffer.