MRAM spotted in Buffalo Memory SSD—for cache

Several sources including TomsHardware.com have reported the appearance at the 15th Embedded Systems Expo in Japan of an SSD built by Buffalo Memory Company with MRAM for cache memory. The drive uses 8Mbytes of MRAM (magnetic RAM) as a cache for the much larger Flash storage array and the nonvolatile nature of the MRAM gives the drive more protection from power loss. All of the articles about this product suggest that the drive has an overall capacity of 4Gbytes, but that seems unlikely in a new product considering the state of Flash manufacturing and the sizes of competing SSDs. We’ll have to wait to see what the final drive looks like because Buffalo has not yet announced the product formally.