14 DAY TRIAL // HGST, formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technology and now a sub-division of Western Digital, has released the Ultrastar 12Gb/s SAS SSD Family, the first to double the maximum SAS interface speed.
There are three solid-state drives in the collection, called Ultrastar SSD800MH, Ultrastar SSD800MM and Ultrastar SSD1000MR.
Ultrastar SSD800MH has capacities of 800 GB, 400 GB and 200 GB.
Ultrastar SSD800MM is similar, but has a slightly lower performance, though still well in line with 12 Gbps rates.
Ultrastar SSD1000MR is the highest-end model, with 1000 GB, 500 GB and 250 GB versions.
"SSDs along with high-performance and high-capacity HDDs are the main building blocks of choice for traditional IT and cloud hyperscale datacenters and represent a market that is expected to grow in excess of $16 billion by 2015," said Jeff Janukowicz, research director, solid-state drives and enabling technologies at IDC.
"SSDs, such as HGST's new SAS SSD family, continue to improve generation to generation to meet today's enterprise workload requirements while driving down the price points to support high I/O applications."
High-frequency trading, online gaming, cloud computing, online banking, and big data analytics are the fields where, HGST believes, its products will be most useful.
The input/output per second (IOPS) performance is of 145,000 when reading and 100,000 (SSD800MH), 70,000 (SSD800MM) or 20,000 (SSD1000MR) when writing.
The read speed is the most important really, since data centers usually have to deal with lots of incoming read requests but comparatively low writing operations.
As for the sequential performance, reading is done at 1200 MB/s and writing is accomplished at 750 MB/s.
"With the industry's highest SAS SSD performance, three endurance-level options, high-capacity and proven reliability, HGST offers the most-advanced 12Gb/s SAS SSDs for the enterprise where it is critical SSDs and HDDs integrate seamlessly in tiered storage environments for optimal efficiency," said Brendan Collins , vice president of product marketing, HGST.
"Combining more than 50 years of design and qualification experience with proven HGST SAS implementation across interface hardware and firmware, HGST's new line of MLC SSDs provides simple, scalable and flexible solutions that ensure system compatibility and ease of integration into new or existing enterprise storage systems and designs."