Fujitsu Readies First SSD Offering, SandForce Meets Micron NAND

Fujitsu has not put much effort into entering the solid state drive market, but that is set to change as the company finds it cannot go against the flow of time.

Fujitsu deals in a lot of things, but solid state drives weren't among them until recently, or at least they weren't an even remotely relevant part of its business.

By the looks of things, this is poised to change, as the company has prepared a series of solid state drives powered by well-known controller and NAND technologies.

While the capacity is provided by MLC (multi-level cell) NAND Flash memory chips from Micron, everything works because of the SandForce SF-2281 controller.

Belonging to the second generation of SF controllers, the SF-2281 can take advantage of the wide bandwidth provided by the SATA III interface, or SATA 6.0 Gbps, as it is otherwise known.

Thus, the maximum performance is of 520 MB/s during sustained writing and 550 MB/s when reading, while the random 4K write performance is 40,000 IOPS.

Of course, as is the case with every other solid state drive out there, the speeds very according to the capacity of each unit.

Since Fujitsu's new line (which does not seem to have any special name, alas) is composed of two models, 120 GB and 240 GB, there are two sets of parameters.

The latter's specs are the ones above, while the 120 GB model lags behind only slightly in terms of write rate.

While reading can still reach 550 MB/s, writing is limited to 500 MB/s, which is still a very high threshold.

Apparently, the newcomers are already up for sale around the world, like in Australia, Hong Kong and Taiwan. There is no availability outside the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region, for now. A sort of average price would be $200, or 152 Euro according to exchange rates.