New Smart Modular Enterprise SSD Works at 500 MB/s

Coming to offer a new product with a name that plays tricks on one's eyes and tongue, Smart Modular Technologies built a new solid state drive, one that it aimed at the enterprise sector.

Solid state drives may not be too common on the enterprise front, but, as in every other eligible area of the IT industry, they are moving forward.

The fact that prices have been falling even as reliability, performance and power efficiency have improved didn't really allow room for much else.

That said, the newest product to be developed by Smart Modular Technologies was not given a price, not yet at least.

This, however, is not too surprising, seeing as how it is not yet available, and even sample shipments aren't set to commence before next month (October, 2011).

Bearing the name of XceedStor 500S, the SSD is made of MLC (multi-level cell) NAND Flash memory chips and uses a second-generation SandForce controller (SF-2500 or SF-2600).

"SandForce is very excited to continue our great relationship and technological collaboration with SMART and accelerate the adoption of solid-state storage in volume enterprise applications," notes Thad Omura, VP of Marketing for SandForce.

"The XceedStor 500S uses the latest SandForce enterprise SSD processor which is equipped with our enterprise tested firmware and feature set, resulting in industry-leading reliability, performance and energy efficiency for the mass server market."

The MTBF is of 2 million hours, while the transfer speeds are of 500 MB/s read/write (4K random read/write performance is 60,000/20,000 IOPS).

Needless to say, the drive has the 2.5-inch form factor and the SATA 3 (SATA 6 Gbps) interface, plus a capacity of 60GB to 480GB.

"The XceedStor 500S SSD expands SMART's SSD portfolio to address the needs of cost-sensitive enterprise datacenters without sacrificing the high level of reliability and performance required by these applications," said John Scaramuzzo, SMART's Senior Vice President and General Manager, Storage Business Unit.

"With the XceedStor 500S SSD, we set out to optimize reliability, performance, and cost, resulting in an enterprise-worthy SATA SSD that enables broad adoption in the enterprise server market."