Biwin Unveils Its First PCIe SSD

Biwin America, Inc., in flash storage products, showcased a working PCIe SSD in a technology demo system in their booth at the Computex convention in Taipei.

Although this product will not be released for sale, it is the precursor to the company’s future line of PCIe-based enterprise class SSDs.

Today’s SATA SSDs deliver sequential and random performance that is faster than HDDs. But enterprise applications demand greater performance, requiring storage solutions with greater bandwidth than SATA can provide.

PCIe offers three advantages as an SSD interface:

• universal availability;
• massive bandwidth in a single volume;
• general freedom from compatibility issues.

As Gen3 PCIe servers are deployed, available bandwidth to accelerate access to data in a single physical volume increases exponentially compared to SATA, with up to 8GB/sec of bandwidth for the PCIE x8 Gen3 bus.

Biwin has committed engineering resources to the development of PCIe-based SSD technology. This product, dubbed the HemiDrive 1, is the company’s first engineering milestone on the road to developing a line of powerful PCIe SSDs.

It is a working engineering prototype that was showcased in a live demo at the Computex 2012 convention.

HemiDrive 1 reaches sequential read and write speeds up to 1200MB/sec and 900MB/sec respectively, and up to 45,000 4K random write IOPS. Biwin expects their future PCIe SSD products to be faster.

"The HemiDrive 1 is an important first step in our PCIe SSD development work, which we are sharing with the public to demonstrate the potential of PCIe. Biwin will develop and take to market a competitive line of PCIe SSD products in coming months that takes full advantage of PCIe’s enormous bandwidth," said Joe James, VP of WW Marketing, Biwin America.