Everspin introduces first MRAM SSDs

Everspin has announced its first SSD line based on mram. Basically they are storage accelerators as the pcie devices offer storage amounts of only one and two gigabytes. Mram must combine the advantages of dram and those of nand.

Mram, or magnetoresistive memory, stores data by taking advantage of the spin of electrons. Storage takes place magnetically and not electrically, so it is fast non-volatile memory without degradation. Mram thus has to combine the durability of magnetic storage with the speed of dram or sram, but a major obstacle so far has been storage density. Everspin has so far supplied discrete mram components for embedded systems, among other things, and the storage density was a maximum of 256Mbit per that with a ddr3 interface.

Everspin now announces its first line of NVME SSDs with PCIe 3.0 x8 interface. The manufacturer uses 32 or 64 mram chips for the nvNitro line to achieve a storage capacity of 1 or 2 GB, respectively. The memory operates at 4kB read at 1.5 million iops with a latency of 6 microseconds. AnandTech pits the iops against the 1.2 million iops for the HGST Ultrastar SN260 SSD, while the latency compares favorably with the 20 microseconds of the Intel SSD DC P3700.

The speeds can be useful in applications such as high frequency trading, database and file system acceleration, and metadata caching. The company is targeting the same market as Intel with its Optane storage. Everspin plans to release SSDs from 4 to 16GB later this year based on DDR4-MRAM. In addition, compact variants based on the m2 and u2 form factor should appear. The first nvNitro products should appear in the second quarter of this year. Everspin customers are currently testing the SSDs.