HGST is announcing a summer release for their new 12Gb/s MLC SAS SSD family, the first 12Gb/s SAS SSDs on the market. Three models comprise the new line including the Ultrastar SSD800MH, Ultrastar SSD800MM and Ultrastar SSD1000MR. The new SAS SSDs utilize co-developed Intel/HGST controllers as well as high endurance 25nm MLC NAND. HGST designed these new drives for the most performance demanding applications such as high-frequency trading, online banking, cloud computing, online gaming, and big data analytics. These applications will benefit from hot caching delivered by the new 12Gb/s SAS SSDs.
HGST is announcing a summer release for their new 12Gb/s MLC SAS SSD family, the first 12Gb/s SAS SSDs on the market. Three models comprise the new line including the Ultrastar SSD800MH, Ultrastar SSD800MM and Ultrastar SSD1000MR. The new SAS SSDs utilize co-developed Intel/HGST controllers as well as high endurance 25nm MLC NAND. HGST designed these new drives for the most performance demanding applications such as high-frequency trading, online banking, cloud computing, online gaming, and big data analytics. These applications will benefit from hot caching delivered by the new 12Gb/s SAS SSDs.
Performance figures show the drives reaching near-PCIe flash numbers, which combined with SAS SSDs’ reliability and adoption will find them homes in enterprise servers and storage arrays. HGST predicts that some users might purchase these drives but wait to upgrade from 6Gb/s. However, HGST claims 6Gb/s users will still get small block performance enhancements. Full 12Gb/s interfacing will also enhance the large block transfers. The new drives also have features to extend reliability and performance including endurance management firmware and power loss data management techniques.
With the upgrade to 12Gb/s SAS SSDs, HGST looks to fill the market for those looking for robust performance within a relative budget. The new drives will offer large cost savings over far more expensive flash solutions, while providing the endurance and performance of enterprise-class products. HGST’s endurance figures show an industry-leading MTBF of 2 million hours.
HGST’s three models each offer their own performance and endurance strengths at different price points to meet enterprise budgets. To start, the Ultrastar SSD800MH has capacities up to 800GB, rates at 25 full drive writes per day (DW/D) for five years, and provides IOPS up to 145,000 read and 100,000 write. Next, the Ultrastar SSD800MM also has a maximum capacity of 800GB, but is more of a mainstream drive rating at 10 DW/D for five years, while providing users performance at up to 145,000 read and 70,000 write IOPS. Rounding out the line, the read-intensive 1TB maximum capacity Ultrastar SSD1000MR rates at two DW/D for five years with performance up to 145,000 read and 20,000 write IOPS. All of these figures come with power usage of 11W. All three drives will have an option to select between 11W or 9W of power to leverage performance or energy efficiency.
Availability
HGST is currently qualifying its SSDs with select OEMs while channel distribution is scheduled for June 2013. The drives will include five-year limited or respective maximum petabytes written warranties. HGST also announced Ultrastar 12Gb/s SAS self-encrypting FIPS 140 SSD models to be available.
