pureSilicon unveils 'rugged' R2 SSD

Targeting military and industrial applications, pureSilicon recently unveiled their new R2 line of 'rugged' SSDs.  Given that solid state drives by nature don't have any moving parts, the specific ruggedized nature of the new R2 line appears to be limited to the design and construction of the exterior casings.  The new R2s come in a variety of sizes ranging from 4 to 256GB, all of which use SLC (as opposed to MLC) flash cells.

Drives up to 128GB in capacity will be shipping starting on October 28th, while the 256GB SATA, 1.8-inch and PATA versions will ship in the first quarter of next year.  The new drives are geared toward use in the industrial military complex segment of the market, and their list of features supports that.  R2 offers real-time hardware encryption/decryption of data - fewer worries about what happens if a drive or notebook are misplaced.  It also supports secure-erase methods that meet "strict government policies".

Specifications:

• Form factor: 2.5-inch, 9.5mm (1.8-inch coming later)
• Capacity: 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256 GB
• Interface: SATA, PATA
• Sequential read: 255MB/s
• Sequential write: 180MB/s
• Average power: 1W or less

One thing that pureSilicon takes special care to point out in their press release is that they use what they call "steady-state" performance results when claiming their read/write speeds.  We've known for some time that SSDs are subject to performance degradation over time (which can be reversed, but always reoccurs) so it's an interesting tack for the company to take.

There are no mentions of price yet, but given that it's mentioned several times about how different the new R2 drives are from typical "consumer-grade" SSDs, you can bet that it won't be cheap.