MFT Price lists

MFT is offered in three versions: a low cost single drive version for Laptops and Workstations, an "MLC" version designed for most server applications, and an Enterprise version suitable principally for high duty cycle server applications using Single-Level Cell (SLC) Flash Drives. Notes and comments about each of the versions are included below the price list, as are special offers regarding demo copies and beta versions.

Bundles May Offer Better Value

Many of our Internet distributors offer MFT bundled together with a particular Flash SSD model. These may be able to offer you a significantly better total value than buying drive(s) and software separately, as we give them superior pricing when they bundle.

Buy or Build Your Own Drives

Elsewhere in this site, you will find that we sell drives and appliances to go with our MFT software solution. You can read about these here and here. However, you are free to buy your flash drives anywhere, as well as to build drives from CF Cards if you wish. You can read about the performance of different drives or components which we have tested here. Most flash drives will work with MFT. What will vary is the performance of a particular drive with MFT. If you want us to test particular drives and publish a review we will be happy to do so. All you have to do is contact us. Alternately, you can perform your own test with software provided as part of the install.

Single-Drive for Laptops and Workstations

Single-drive MFT software is an exceptionally low cost version designed for use on Laptops and Workstations where only one flash drive is present. If multiple flash drives are available, or if no drive can be seen because the drive is behind a RAID controller, the software will not install. The partition, or combination of partitions, activated with MFT can be of any size up to 128GB. Similarly, the flash disk itself may be of any size, without restriction.

Single-Drive-Performance Edition for Linux and Windows Servers

Single-Drive-Performance MFT software for Linux and Windows Servers is a low cost way to speed up web and other simple servers. This version throttles performance to that of a single drive at a time though, unlike the workstation model, multiple drives are supported. To put this in perspective, the slowest SSDs currently have random IO thruput that is 25 times as fast as a 7200 rpm hard disk, and 10 times as fast as a 15000 rpm drive. On the other hand, the 2,500 to 7,500 IOs per second that can be expected from a single drive is vastly slower than what is possible when drives have multiple thread support. Here, we have already achieved arrays that can reach 120,000+ read IOs per second and 50,000+ write IOs. These numbers can be expected to increase as disk controllers adapt to the realities of flash media. Single-Drive-Performance MFT software is licensed based upon net usable space. Thus, you can use either a raid 5, 6, or 10 configuration merely for the cost of the additional drives. Similarly, to the degree you are using only Linux, it is possible for the mirror drives in a raid-10 set to be low cost 7200 or 10k rpm hard disk drives.

"MLC" Server Edition

This low cost server version of MFT is intended for use with high performance MLC drives. Here, the best performing of such products can deliver practical performance 20 times higher than a 15,000 rpm SAS hard disk drive, and 70 times faster than a commodity 7,200 rpm SATA hard disk drive. The MLC variant has no speed restrictions but is "tuned" to the erase cycle limitations of Multi-Level Cell flash (MLC) media (which is much less expensive than SLC flash media). In the case of the 20,000 erase cycles of the current best grade of MLC flash media, this permits approximately four full overwrites of the Flash drive daily. In considering this limitation, people should remember that the MFT MLC driver, when used with MLC media, can generally do more work in a day than can a similarly sized 15k rpm SAS operating in a 100% utilization environment 24 hours a day. If you want to learn more about the drive life assurance feature, you can read about it here. If you want to learn more about MLC options, then click here.

Enterprise Server Edition

The Enterprise version is intended for full duty SLC drives that have a 5x to 10x longer erase life than MLC media. SLC drives also typically have faster random read and random write times than MLC drives, and will typically outperform 15,000 rpm SAS hard disks by a factor of at least 30, while outperforming commodity 7,200 rpm SATA hard disks by a factor of at least 100. To learn more about Enterprise drives, click here.

Hard Disk Drive Server Edition

The Hard Disk Drive Server version of MFT is designed for parallel use with Flash Drives in both Linux servers and in storage appliances. In this environment, drives are typically mirrored raid-10, with the flash drives as the primary stripe and the hard disks as the secondary stripe. As the hard disks linear write as fast as the flash drives, while Linux permits designation of the strip to be read, this permits low cost mirroring using either 7200 rpm or 10k rpm drives. This method is not suitable for windows applications except when used with appliance storage.

If connectivity permits, it is possible to also use two appliances: one with flash media only and one with hard disks, with user-controlled failover techniques. Some users overly concerned with flash media failure may prefer this technique. If both the hard disk and flash media are stripes on the same appliance or Linux box, there is no additional cost for hard drive mirroring. HDD MLC pricing only applies where one appliance consists of flash disks and a separate appliance consists of hard disks.

Pricing Modulus for Server Versions

The MLC, and Enterprise server versions of MFT are sold in a pricing modulus of 32GB of net addressable space. Addressable space excludes both parity drives in a striped RAID environment and mirror drives in a Mirrored Raid Environment. It also excludes "dedicated" free space which you choose to set aside as unaddressable, but does include practically free space which also accelerates performance but is addressable. You can read about how free space improves performance here.

Free Evaluation Copies

MFT makes any Flash SSD faster. If you already have a Flash SSD, you can evaluate MFT without cost. Click here to go to our Downloads section and learn more.