HGST has started shipping their Ultrastar SN100 Series, which is a range of NVM Express solid state drives that packs extremely fast read and write speeds over their four lane PCI Express 3.0 interface. Like many PCIe drives, these SSDs are destined for server applications, but that doesn't make them any less interesting.
Both the 3.2 TB and 1.6 TB SN100 drives pack top-of-the-line performance to go along with their huge capacities. Both drives are rated for 3,000 MB/s sequential reads, 1,600 MB/s sequential writes, as well as 743k IOPS 4kB random reads, 160k IOPS writes, and 310k IOPS with a 70/30 mix of reads and writes. There's also an 800 GB variant available, but its rated speeds are lower across the board.
The SN100 Series consists of two different models with identical specifications. The SN150 is a half-height, half-length expansion card that slots directly into PCI Express slots, while the SM100 is the same drive in a 2.5-inch hot-swappable form factor utilizing an SFF-8639 connector.
The SN150 is available right now, according to HGST, while the SN150 will be available next month. Like with most enterprise SSD launches, there's no word on how much these drives will cost, but as they're not targeted at the consumer market, expect them to cost a sweet fortune.