CES 2014: Sandisk UlltraDimm – Future of Storage?

I was fortunate enough to spend some one on one time with Sandisk at CES 2014 and they were showing off their UltraDIMM. The Sandisk UltraDIMM as you can see fits right into the DDR3 slots on the motherboard, but it’s not exactly RAM, it’s a storage device. The particular one we are looking at above is a 200GB SSD. One of the biggest reasons for this is putting the storage device as close to the CPU as possible, cutting out all the middle men thus reducing the latency and overhead. This reduces the latency to next to nothing, improving the overall user experience. With technology like this available it makes me wonder if SSD’s as we know them will fade away while the super fast technologies like the Sandisk UlltraDIMM take over.

Latency is one of the issues that many people are concerned about, one of the solutions that we’ve seen is PCIe devices. The problem with PCIe Devices is that the devices have to contend with each other for the PCIe lanes which can create a bottleneck and reduce the performance. The UlltraDIMM bypasses all that, and should be a great option for storage.