New Name in SSDs: I/O Switch Technologies

We heard recently for the first time about this start-up that was exhibiting at last CES. I/O Switch Technologies, Inc. is a privately held company born last year in Santa Clara, CA. Note that its web site is not working correctly.

It was founded by two people unknown in the storage industry: Ron Herardian who worked at Cisco and Netscape, and VP engineering Jay Wang previously at JW Electronics and Comax Technologies. In the team there is also Dimitar Boyn, office of the CTO.

I/O Switch engineers designed the Raijin data access acceleration cards that are PCIe 2.0 M.2 SSDs in a PCIe 3.0 X4 HHHL (half height half length) adapter eliminating SATA III bottleneck for Macintosh computers up to OS 10.6, and mainly now the new Mac Pro.

In fact it contains the new Plextor M6e M.2 PCIe SSD with Marvell controller and Toshiba Toggle Mode 19nm MLC NAND flash. But for booting a computer with Raijin, the SSD is at the source of the operation, not the adapter card.

With Serial ATA Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI), the products are available with capacities of 128GB, 256GB and 512GB, and we got different high prices from the web: more generally “from $594“, and $471 at 128GB and $858 at 256GB. They are available exclusively on ioswith web site

For the 512GB model, in term of performance, main specs are 740MB/s and 640MB/s transfer rate, 750,000 IO/s (512B) and 600,000 IO/s, 120ms and 49ms access latency, all these figures for read and write respectively. All SSDs support SMART, NCQ and TRIM.

I/O Switch is seeking investors to fund manufacturing, purchase components and enable marketing and sales.