From: "Rich Gauszka" 


Unfortunately it looks like we'll have to wait till 2012 to get these
prices even below $2 a GB.

http://biz.yahoo.com/pz/070418/117663.html

TEC, Inc. today announced an extension to its Zeus-IOPS Solid State Drive
(SSD) family with the addition of 512GB and 256GB versions offering
enterprise systems the performance equivalent of up to 200 hard drives in
just one drive. The company also announced that an important agreement has
been put in place with a worldwide leader of on-demand and real-time media
delivery technology systems, wherein the Zeus-IOPS SSD was thoroughly
analyzed and successfully deployed. This important customer views STEC's
SSD technology as a vital means to enabling video-on-demand services at
speeds that were unattainable using traditional rotating hard drive
solutions. STEC will showcase the Flash-based Zeus-IOPS Solid State Hard
Drives at Storage Networking World, April 16-19, 2007 at the Manchester
Grand Hyatt in San Diego, CA (Booth PP3).

...
High Performance at a Competitive Cost

While hard drive access times are measured in milliseconds, access times
for Zeus-IOPS are in microseconds, enabling a significant increase in
server processor utilization. Additionally, Zeus-IOPS SSDs are more than
200 times faster at random transactional performance than a 15K RPM
enterprise hard disk drive, providing lower cost per transaction and
enabling higher performing systems with far less hardware costs.

For comparable performance, a 200 hard drive enterprise system would cost
two to three times more than a Zeus-IOPS system due to additional up-front
hardware and reoccurring maintenance, power and cooling costs.

``The market has clearly embraced our Zeus-IOPS product line,'' said Steve
Garceau, senior manager, SSD marketing at STEC. ``We were the first to
demonstrate such high levels of performance and customers indicated they
wanted even higher capacities than our initial capacity points. STEC
responded by extending the product line and is dedicated to solving key
challenges for our customers in the fastest time possible.''

STEC believes that solid-state Flash drives with high-IOPS performance will
address the growing needs of the enterprise-class drive market. With NAND
Flash prices declining on a continued rapid pace, prices for FC, SAS and
SATAII-based SSDs are expected to drop below $2 per GB by 2012 which
implies 512GB of high-performance storage for less than $1,000. Based upon
these capacity and pricing dynamics, STEC expects that the high-IOPS SSD
will make up a significant percentage of the $5 billion high-performance
hard-drive market. This will make the comparative performance gains of SSD
over HDD even more compelling.

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