Hitachi Ultrastar solid-state drives

The Ultrastar solid-state drive (SSD) family are claimed to be the first SAS and FC enterprise-class SSDs and are suitable for those using tiered storage as a method of managing the escalating performance, capacity, endurance and reliability requirements of data centres. The family is available in 100, 200 and 400 GB capacities, featuring both 2.5″ 6 Gbps serial attached SCSI (SAS) and 3.5″ 4 Gbps Fibre Channel interfaces.

Working with Intel, the Ultrastar SSD400S family combines enterprise-grade NAND flash, endurance firmware and power loss management techniques to extend the reliability, endurance and sustained performance of the SSD family. The 400 GB SSD can endure up to 35 PB of random writes over the life of the drive, which is the equivalent of writing 19.2 TB/day for five years, ensuring greater utilisation and reliability in the most demanding enterprise environments. For complete end-to-end data protection and reliability, the family includes advanced data integrity and power loss management technologies that are tied with industry standards to ensure compatibility in multitiered SSD/HDD system designs.

The family is claimed to be the first to reach up to 535 MBps read and 500 MBps write throughput with 6 Gbps SAS, and 390 MBps read and 340 MBps write throughput with 4 Gbps FC. The drive also delivers up to 46,000 read and 13,000 sustained write IOPS, reaching speeds 100 times faster than traditional hard drives, resulting in rapid response times for real-time transaction processing access to ‘hot’ enterprise data for improved productivity and operational efficiency. As fewer SSDs are required to achieve the same HDD performance, the family provides value in terms of IOPS per watt, while reducing TCO through low power consumption, efficient cooling and reduced space requirements.