Chiron was also announced at CES 2012 and stakes a claim to be the 'world's fastest and highest capacity SATA SSD'. The highest capacity award certainly seems to be a shoe-in with a roomy 4TBs in 3.5" form factor, with the additional benefit of the ability to deploy up-to 96TB of storage in a 4U rackmount server chassis. Based on an Indilinx controller, performance is still up there at 100,000 IOPS and 560MB/s; whilst such performance can sometimes lead to a build-up of heat the perforated chassis design of the Chiron ensures cool operation and no reliability issues due to temperature.



Of particular interest to the consumer sector should be the revamped Everest platform which now features Triple-Level Cell NAND Flash. TLC SSDs have up-to 30% lower cost than standard MLC SSDs, making it ideal for tablets, laptops and workstations that have previously been considered too price-sensitive. The Indilinx controller of the platform has solid performance figures of 500MB/s and 30K IOPS, ample for most consumer-level applications.



The æonDrive is something of a departure from the drives listed previously. Rather than NAND, the æonDrive leverages the high IOPS and low latency of DRAM to create a drive composed of 'Pseudo-Nonvolatile memory' as a low-cost, high-performance alternative. Via a proprietry controller, the drive is capable of up to 140,000 4K IOPS and 540,000 512 Byte IOPS and ultra-low latency (>20 μs); this makes the solution ideal for caching applications and critical data transactions.

The æonDrive makes use of a native 6GB/s SAS interface for integration into existing server infrastructure and management software, and will be available in capacities of up to 64GB.