Solid-State Solo: The SSD Upgrade That Could've Made the Kessel Run a Breeze

On his first meeting with moisture farm boy Luke Skywalker in a bar in Mos Eisley, legendary smuggler Han Solo claimed that one of his greatest feats was making the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs, smashing a longstanding record.

You might be forgiven for thinking that means he made the trip, which traverses a dangerous area in space to move illicit product from the spice mines of Kessel to the planet Oba Diah, faster than anyone else. In fact, a parsec is a measurement of distance, not time – equivalent to roughly 3.3 light years – so his accomplishment was taking a shorter route than ever before.

Why is this significant? Because the Kessel Run crosses through the Akkadese Maelstrom, which is highly unstable and crowded with debris. Hyperspace travel in the Millennium Falcon, as in other capable starships, is inherently dangerous due to the risk of collision with celestial objects.

So the fact that Solo found a shorter route is a testament to his appetite for risk, the capabilities of his ship’s navigational computer, or a bit of both.

We’ve run the numbers at Solidigm, and we’re here to say: He did a great job. But if the Falcon were equipped with high-performance SSDs, it probably could’ve been done in 10.

A team of highly skilled Solidigm engineers has spent the last several months studying Millennium Falcon schematics and developing a working hyperspace drive prototype to establish the baseline performance that enabled Solo and co-pilot Chewbacca to complete their legendary Kessel Run.* With that data in hand, we turned up the ship’s capabilities by replacing its conventional hard drives with an array of Solidigm D5-P5336 SSDs.

With an industry-leading capacity of 61.44TB per drive, the Solidigm solution was able to store far more detailed star maps, increasing the ship’s visibility into potential hazards. And with random read performance of over 1 million IOPS, navigational algorithms ran faster, enabling the Falcon to make better split-second decisions to optimize the route traveled.

All credit where it’s due – Solo’s feat was impressive by any measure, and he remains the title holder. But for anyone thinking of challenging the record, give us a call first.

Happy May the 4th to all who celebrate!

*OK, we didn't actually get our hands on the Falcon schematics. But our team of data storage engineers does work hard to continually improve performance and bring outstanding storage solutions to market, whether those markets are on Earth or in a galaxy far, far away.