Lucas Mearian
Senior Reporter

Hitachi releases first 25nm SLC SSDs for storage arrays

News
Feb 9, 20122 mins

Enterprise-class SSD drive family offers up to 400GB capacity and 536MB/sec throughput

Hitachi GST announced the Ultrastar SSD400S.B, which uses high-endurance SLC NAND flash memory to create an enterprise-class drive that also comes with native encryption.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (GST) Wednesday unveiled what it calls the first enterprise-class, single-level cell NAND flash solid-state drive (SSD) that uses 25 nanometer technology.

The new Ultrastar SSD400S.B is a 2.5-in form factor SSD using a serial attached SCSI (SAS) 6Gbps interface. It comes in 100GB-, 200GB- and 400GB-capacity versions.

Other vendors have produced 25nm SSDs using multi-level cell (MLC) technology and serial ATA interfaces. SAS drives are more resilient because they are dual ported allowing for failover if one port goes bad.

Hitachi’s new Ultrastar SSD

The new Ultrastar drives come with native encryption capability.

“Security is a growing concern among enterprise customers, especially those in financial services, e-commerce and online transaction processing,” Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing for Hitachi GST, said in a statement. “Our solid state drives are designed to deliver the highest level of performance.”

Hitachi is using SLC NAND from Intel. The SLC NAND flash, while more expensive, has vastly greater native performance and reliability compared with MLC drives, which require special software to increase their longevity and reliability.

A 400GB model of the Ultrastar SSD can endure up to 35 petabytes (PB) of random writes over the life of the drive, Hitachi GST said. That’s the equivalent of writing 19.2TB/day for five years.

The Ultrastar SSD400S.B delivers up to 536MB/sec sequential read rates and 502MB/sec sequential write rates. It can deliver up to 57,500 sustained random read I/Os per second (IOPS) and 25,500 sustained random write IOPS.

Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian , or subscribe to Lucas’s RSS feed . His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com .

Read more about storage in Computerworld’s Storage Topic Center.

Lucas Mearian

With a career spanning more than two decades in journalism and technology research, Lucas Mearian is a seasoned writer, editor, and former IDC analyst with deep expertise in enterprise IT, infrastructure systems, and emerging technologies. Currently a senior writer at Computerworld covering AI, the future of work, healthcare IT and financial services IT, his 23-year tenure has included roles such as Senior Technology Editor and Data Storage Channel Editor, where he covered cutting-edge topics like blockchain, 3D printing, sustainable IT, and autonomous vehicles. He has appeared on several podcasts, including Foundry’s Today In Tech. He also served as a research manager at IDC, where he focused on software-defined infrastructure, compute, and storage within the Infrastructure Systems, Platforms, and Technologies group.

Before entering tech media, he served as Editor-in-Chief of the Waltham Daily News Tribune and as a senior reporter for the MetroWest Daily News. He’s won first place awards from the New England Press Association, the American Association of Business Publication Editors, and has been a finalist for several Jesse H. Neal Awards for outstanding business journalism. A former U.S. Marine Corps sergeant who served in reconnaissance, he brings a disciplined, analytical mindset to his work, along with outstanding writing, research, and public speaking skills.

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