Why BiTMICRO is Number One
By Jun Alejo

STORAGEsearch.com, considered in the IT industry as a major source of information for anything and everything related to data storage, recently released the results of its quarterly report ranking the top 10 solid-state disk OEMs worldwide in terms of reader page views. According to the website’s publisher, search volume data, aka page view, is a good barometer for gauging market trends as it offers insights on the popularity of new and emerging technologies and disruptions in the storage market.

BiTMICRO Networks, which has consistently figured in the top 5 since STORAGEsearch.com first published the ranking in the second quarter of 2007, shot up to the number one slot in the fourth quarter results, overtaking big names and deep pocketed players in the SSD industry such as SanDisk and STEC.

The Fremont-based OEM’s popularity among STORAGEsearch.com readers is not just a reflection of strong market interest in the company’s product pre-announcements but also, on a macro scale, a fairly accurate gauge of where the SSD industry is going. In October 2007, BiTMICRO pre-announced the E-Disk® Altima™ E2A3 Serial ATA (SATA) model, a 2.5-inch, flash based SATA SSD capable of storing up to 416GB of data with sustained transfer rates of up to 100MB/sec.

A couple of weeks later, the company announced plans to release the E-Disk® Altima™ E3F4FL solid state drive which offers sustained rates of more than 230 MB/s, over 55,000 IOPS and an eye-popping capacity of up to 1.6 TB in a 3.5-inch form factor.

According to IDC, market acceptance for SSDs will be entirely dependent on two factors: price and capacity. When Samsung unveiled its 1TB hard disk drive last year, IDC’s research manager for hard disk drives John Rydning was quoted as saying that market demand for storage capacity continues to rise at a CAGR of almost 60 percent, thanks to strong demand by data centers for high capacity disk drives. Hitachi is banking on the same market forecast as the company embarks on a quest to launch 4TB desktop drives by 2011 using new nanometer recording technologies.

BiTMICRO’s recent announcements show that the company is almost halfway there, three years ahead of Hitachi’s self-imposed deadline. What’s even better is that the NAND flash-based E-Disk Altima solid state disk is laying more on the table for storage users; better tolerance for harsh operating environments, low latency and fast random read performance. Data center managers consider these features as the holy grail of enterprise storage, the same capabilities have made the pioneering E-Disk brand popular in the military and embedded/industrial markets.

These same NAND flash SSD advantages are just as beneficial to the personal computing market. The increasing popularity of flash memory based storage in mobile computing augurs well for the solid state disk industry as SSDs provide durable, portable and battery-friendly storage for notebook computers. Technologies such as BiTMICRO’s PowerGuard and DataSentinel even offer additional data protection capabilities in the event of ungraceful power shutdowns, perfect for laptops containing sensitive corporate files or that all-important business presentation.

IDC is predicting that the price parity between flash solid state drives and magnetic HDDs will be very close by 2011 and, as seen from STORAGEsearch.com’s traffic reports, BiTMICRO’s product pre-announcements are tickling the fancy of the storage market. Why not? In this era of gigabyte-hungry operating systems and capacity crunching multimedia applications, the “Bigger is Better” cliché remains true to this day.

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