The number of random I/O operations per second possible with a top end, high specification enterprise class (15,000 rpm) conventional disk drive is measured in the order of hundreds - approx. 250 per second. With a Solid State storage device it is measured in the thousands, or in the case of the Gnutek Maracite range Tens of Thousands - approx. 52,000 per second. This is mainly due to the elimination of delays caused by mechanical movement, but with the Gnutek Maracite performance has been further enhanced by using a powerful RISC processor, hardware assist functions and 512 Mbytes of high speed intelligent cache. Together with hardware that allows many Nand Flash chips to be read and/or written in parallel this means that the Maracite range is as fast as most DRAM based products while requiring only a fraction of the space and power.
The Maracite performance figures for random or sequantial access, to or from the storage media are: