Western Digital's new platform offers fastest flash storage speeds

One of the main advantages of the switch from HDDs to SSDs in computers is the incredible speed improvements. That does not mean that companies are satisfied with where we are, though. Western Digital has just announced a new platform that achieves the fastest speeds yet for flash storage. The platform is capable of speeds up to 18 million I/O operations per second. Currently, just one or two million IOPS is still considered fast. However, the company wants its platform to be used in commercial sectors that have a need for speed. This includes government and finance sectors, where speed counts for a lot. A difference in milliseconds can mean millions of dollars in the finance industry.

To achieve these speeds, Western Digital said it used "industry-standard NVMe SSDs connected to multiple servers over a PCIe switched fabric." The low-latency of these materials helped the company achieve the fast speeds.

Western Digital plans to release the new platform in the first half of 2017, although no exact release date has been announced. The maker also said it plans on releasing some support software to the open-source community, which is good for other makers and the industry as a whole.

SSDs are already playing an increasingly important role in the market. High-end laptops almost exclusively use them these days because of the speed improvements over HDDs. Samsung expects SSD shipments to surpass that of HDDs in 2017. While SSDs are already used broadly in servers, improved speed as seen in Western Digital's new platform is always a welcome sign as companies push hardware capability forward.