14 DAY TRIAL // In November of last year, Intel and Hitachi announced that they had teamed up in an effort to battle SandForce and Toshiba in the SSD enterprise market, the first solid state disk to result from this collaboration just being showcased during CES 2011.
The resulting drive is called the Hitachi UltraStar SSD400S and is able to achieve read transfer rates of up to 535MB/s while running on a 6Gbit/s SAS interface.
In addition, write speed is rated at a maximum of 500MB/s, 4K random read IOPS are estimated at a maximum of 46,000 and 4K random write can reach up to 13,000 IOPS
In comparison, SandForce's next generation SF-2000 enterprise controller is able to reach sequential read speeds of up to 500MB/s while using a 6Gbps SATA interface (high-end enterprise drives will feature a native SAS to SATA bridge), its write speed also being rated at 500MB/s.
However, SandForce's controller seems to lead in input/output operations per second as the company announced that drives based on their SSD processor can reach up to 60,000 random read/write IOPS.
Hitachi's new enterprise drives will be available in 100GB, 200GB and 400GB capacities and use SLC (single level cell) NAND memory.
According to Tweak Town, the website that stumbled upon these SSDs during CES 2011, the Hitachi Ultrastar SSD400S product family is currently in validation with several OEM partners, just like the Toshiba and SandForce 2K series.
A shipment schedule has not been provided but these should be expected sometime in late Q1 2011 or early Q2 2011, just in time to compete with SF-2000.
Together with these new enterprise drives, Intel also plans to release its third generation consumer SSDs in the first quarter of 2011.
According to early reports, Intel X25-M G3 will carry a hefty performance boost when compared to G2 units and are based on 25nm NAND flash.