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California's BiTMICRO has announced it has pushed the capacity of its 2.5-inch solid-state drives to a mammoth 416 GB - but they're for military and industrial clients.

It seems like just yesterday we were noting that systems were finally starting to ship with Samsung's 64 GB flash-based solid-state drives, a nifty alternative to traditional hard drive technology which uses less power and offers greater reliability…at the price (for now) of higher costs and lower storage capacities. However, that may be changing: at the Defence Systems & Equipment International Exhibition in London, California's BiTMICRO has announced it has crammed 416 GB of capacity into a ruggedized 2.5-inch ATA version of its E-Disk Altima line of solid state drives. The bad news is that there's no word on pricing, and—if the name of the expo weren't enough of a hint—the device is intended for military and industrial purposes, rather than end users.

BiTMICRO says the 416 GB E-Disk Altima can sustain transfers of up to 100 MB per second with bursts up to 133 GB/sec. The unit has an operating range from -40°C to 85°C, making it suitable for use in human-hostile environments. The drive supports PIO 0-4, DMA 0-2, and UDMA 0-6 transfer modes, and offers an ATA/ATAPI-7 PATA interface.

"For storage users in the military and industrial markets, high disk capacities equate to longer hours, even days, of non-stop operation. Just like enterprise users, these markets desire continually increasing drive capacities to meet exponential growth in their storage requirements," said Rudy Bruce, BiTMICRO's executive VP for marketing and sales, in a statement. "The launch of the E-Disk Altima series of cutting-edge solid state flash drives will usher in a new computing era, where solid state mass storage will combine with multi-core processors to deliver unprecedented levels of performance required by next-generation operating systems and applications."

BiTMICRO expects to begin production on the drives in the first quarter of 2008, with the first units shipping in March 2008.