Little-known Foremay Shipping Fast 1.8-inch Micro-SSD

Wonders never cease in the SSD world — or in any storage sector, in our humble opinion.

Ever heard of Foremay? It’s an 8-year-old company based in Pasadena, Calif., with a global vision and offices in Norway, Korea, China and Taiwan.

Not many IT companies are based in Pasadena, even though wonderful scientific seats of learning CalTech and Occidental are all right in that Rose Bowl neighborhood. In any case, Foremay is starting to show up on some new radars.

Foremay made news Nov. 2 because it came out with a new 1.8-inch micro-SSD with dimensions smaller than a credit card and a mere 3mm to 5mm thick. The company describes it as a “micro SATA SSD drive” that is the “fastest 1.8-inch drive now available.”

Foremay contends that it can deliver read/write speeds up to 280 MB/s, 4kB random IOPS of 30,000 in read, and 15,000 in write. Capacity isn’t bad either, at up to 400 GB.

Pretty impressive, if it’s all true. Foremay claims that its little drives are quite powerful and are capable of being deployed not only in high-end laptops, but also in industrial PC, HPC and enterprise servers.

Foreway describes itself this way:

““Founded in Silicon Valley in 2002, Foremay, Inc., is a leading company dedicated to designing and developing of Solid State Drives (SSD) for industrial computing, mission critical computing, embedded computing, enterprise severs, web and e-mail servers, commercial laptops, desktops and workstations, and mobile computing. Foremay’s vision is to bring high reliability, high ruggedness, high performance and low power consumption (“Green Initiatives”) to flash hard drives across the entire storage industry … Foremay was founded by a team of semiconductor and network industry veterans from Cisco, IBM, NEC, Nokia, Alcatel and AT&T.”“

Fair enough. We’ll add Foremay to our SSD vendors file.