Storage vendors have been sieging the large business market with solid state drive offerings for years — but cost and capacity restrictions have mostly kept them at the gate. Only recently has the technology advanced enough to to make SSD gear a plausible replacement for traditional disk storage.

Take BitMicro for instance, which this week unveiled a flash memory-based solid state drive with up to 1.6TB capacity. The company's E-Disk Altima, expected to ship in Q1 2008, will come in a 3.5-inch format and support 4Gbit/s Fibre Channel.

The new drive is designed for high-bandwidth storage applications such as streaming video on demand, medical imaging, data recording, warehousing and online transactions. BitMicro says the Altima offers sustained rates of more than 230MB/s and upwards of 55,000 I/O operations per second. To compare, a fast disk drive will get about 400 I/O operations per second.

BitMicro will push the SSDs with capacities from 16GB to 1.6TB. In addition to 4Gbit/s Fibre Channel, the disks will also be fully compatible with 1Gbit/s and 2Gbit/s Fibre Channel devices.

The firm says it will begin sampling the drives in the first quarter of 2008 and will ship in volume by Q2 08. ®