Company Seeks to Eliminate PCI Express SSD Reliance on Drivers

Integrated Device Technology, Inc., IDT for short, will participate in the Flash Memory Summit that will take place later this month, between August 21 and 23.

There, it will introduce a product that may just mark a new age for solid-state drives meant to be inserted into PCI Express slots.

Currently, PCI Express SSDs are tricky to use, both in personal computers (where they are almost never heard of) and in enterprise applications (data centers, servers, etc.).

This is largely due to the fact that they need proprietary drivers, restricting their interoperability significantly.

There is also the matter of the PCI Express drives only being as good as the driver is at handling the resources of the NAND chips and the controller.

IDT will release a special standard, called NVM Express, that will remove the need for special drivers and will possess a better registry interface, feature set and command set to boot.

“As the developer of the industry’s first flash controller with native PCIe for enterprise SSDs and a founding member of the NVMe promoter group, IDT is committed to the development of enterprise PCIe-based flash controllers,” said Kam Eshghi, senior director of marketing of the enterprise computing division of IDT.

“PCI Express provides the performance and low latency needed to realize the full potential of enterprise SSDs. The Flash Memory Summit is an ideal venue for showcasing the innovative work that IDT has been doing in this area.”

IDT's Director of Engineering in the Enterprise Computing Division, Peter Onufryk, will describe the standard and its advantages in a keynote / press event, called “How the Streamlined Architecture of NVM Express Enables High Performance PCIe SSDs.”

The goal of it all is to “drive the adoption of PCIe SSDs and realize the performance potential of SSD technology.” We'll wait and see if things truly turn out this way.

Via: Company Seeks to Eliminate PCI Express SSD Reliance on Drivers