Dell recently introduced the industry’s fastest Enterprise class storage medium, Solid State Disk drives (SSDs) in select Power Edge servers. Solid State, the use of NAND Flash as a storage medium versus traditional rotating disks, is not a new idea. Consumer electronics have made use of NAND Flash at small capacity points for over two decades.

In the past, the cost of NAND and the available capacity points had made the technology impractical for use as a mass storage device.

Recent increases in capacity capability combined with lowered costs for NAND Flash have allowed architecture designers to create solutions that take advantage of the inherent benefits of NAND Flash over spinning disk as a mass storage medium.