If you have to ask how much it costs, you can't afford one. That statement likely applies to Bitmicro's new E-Disk Altima E2A3GL, which crams up to 461 GB of flash memory into a standard 2.5-inch hard drive form-factor, and which targets military and industrial applications.

According to the company, this solid state disk (SSD) has a standard Serial ATA (SATA) interface, and is operating system independent. Completely bootable, it requires no special device drivers.

At a time when 16 GB flash cards are still considered novel, Bitmicro uses high-density single level cell (SLC) NAND flash memory chips to achieve the 416 GB maximum capacity. Smaller capacities are also available, ranging from 288 GB all the way down to 4 GB.

Supporting operating temperatures ranging from -40 to +85 degrees Celsius, the E-Disk Altima offers a claimed 300 MB/sec burst data transfer rate, with up to 100 MB/sec sustained reads and writes. The drive is further said to be capable of up to 20,000 random I/O operations per second.

Bitmicro also says it has alleviated concerns about wear, thanks to advanced data-writing algorithms. The drive is said to offer ten years of data integrity, an MTBF better than 1.9 million hours, and unlimited read endurance.

Write endurance is not infinite, but likely “sufficient,” as Rolls-Royce used to say about its horsepower. While the company does not publish this specification for the 461 GB E-Disk Altima, a 32 GB version is rated for 1,315 years of 100 GB/day erase/write cycles.

Published specifications for the E-Disk Altima include:

• Performance:
  • Access time — 30 to 100 microseconds
    
  • Burst transfer rate — 300 MB/sec.
    
  • Sustained transfer rate — up to 100 MB/sec.
    
  • I/O operations per second — Up to 20,000
• Environmental specifications:
  • Operating temperature 0-70 degrees C (“commercial” range), -40 to +85 degrees C (“industrial” range)
    
  • Shock (operating) — 1,250 G
    
  • Vibration (operating) — 16.4 G rms
• Reliability:
  • MTBF — 1.9 million hours, minimum
    
  • Error correction — corrects up to 9 random bit errors per 528-byte block
    
  • Data integrity — up to ten years
    
  • Read endurance — unlimited

• Physical specifications:
  • Form-factor — 2.5-inch HDD
    
  • Dimensions — 2.75 x 3.95 x 0.93 inches (69.85 x 100.45 x 23.55 mm) maximum, storage capacities 64 GB and below are 0.33 inches thick
    
  • Weight — 2.9 to 7.8 ounces (83 to 221 grams)

The drive targets military and industrial applications, in which, according to Bitmicro CMO Rudy Bruce, “high disk capacities equate to longer hours, even days, of non-stop operation. Just like enterprise users, these markets desire continually increasing drive capacities to meet exponential growth in their storage requirements.”

The company says it will begin sampling the drive in the first quarter of 2008, and shipping by March. Pricing, as we hinted above, was not released.

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