SanDisk puts flash memory on a RAM stick with ULLtraDIMM SSD

 SanDisk’s new solid state drive was first showcased late last year and is unlike any other
 you’ve seen. It bypasses Serial ATA and PCI Express interfaces and instead relies on the
 memory channel as its gateway to the rest of the system. Known as SanDisk ULLtraDIMM
 SSDs and built in cooperation with Diablo Technologies, it’s essentially solid state flash
 memory that has been mated to a RAM module for a more direct path to the CPU.

 As you likely already know, traditional RAM is volatile which means it doesn’t store data once
 the power has been cut. The opposite holds true with SanDisk’s new product and on top of
 that, they boast much larger capacities than regular DIMMs. The company is initially rolling
 out units with capacities  of 200GB and 400GB using 19-nanometer MLC flash.

The primary benefit of having storage as close to the CPU as possible is of course low
 latency times.

 The company says ULLtraDIMMs provide less than 5ms write latency which is the lowest in
 the industry. Elsewhere, users can expect random performance of 150K read IOPS and 65K
 write IOPS and 1GB/s
 / 760MB/s of sustained read/write performance. What’s more, they can scale I/O performance
 linearly
 while maintaining consistent write latency.

Endurance shouldn’t be much of a concern either as the drives are rated for 10 full writes per
 day for five years. That works out to more than seven petabytes on the 400GB model not too
 shabby.

SanDisk said the modules are now shipping for qualification and should be available to enterprise
 users in the near future.