As expected, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies has announced its new Ultrastar brand of Solid State Drives (SSDs). The Ultrastar SSD400S family comes in 100GB, 200GB, and 400GB flavors. The latter can endure up to 35PB of random writes over the life of the drive, which is the equivalent of writing 19.2TB per day for five years.
The world's first jointly developed SAS and FC enterprise-class SSDs combine Hitachi's HDD expertise with Intel's 34nm single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash memory. Hitachi and Intel announced their plan to jointly work on enterprise-class SSDs in late 2008. The Ultrastar SSD400S family includes advanced data integrity and power loss management technologies to ensure compatibility in multi-tiered SSD/HDD system designs.
The new Ultrastar SSD400S family features both 2.5-inch 6Gbps Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and 3.5-inch 4Gbps Fibre Channel (FC) interfaces. Ultrastar also has the industry's highest sequential throughput: up to 535MBps read and 500MBps write for 6Gbps SAS and 390MBps read and 340MBps write for 4Gbps FC. The new drive also delivers up to 46,000 read and 13,000 sustained write IOPS, reaching speeds 100 times faster than traditional HDDs.
"Hitachi's strategic investment and commitment in the enterprise market is evident with the new Ultrastar SSD family," Mike Cordano, Hitachi's executive vice president of worldwide sales and marketing, said in a statement. "Our new SSD product family not only symbolizes our market opportunity to serve evolving cloud data center infrastructures, but also delivers value to our customers in terms of increasing data center performance and reducing total cost of ownership. With qualifications now underway, we anticipate volume shipments to commence in the first half of 2011."