14 DAY TRIAL // Toshiba's newest range of solid-state drives has nothing on the world's First 1 TB mSATA SSD that Samsung released the other day, but then again, it's not really supposed to. After all, that one was made of super-thin laptops and the like, while the new Toshiba HK3R is intended for enterprise systems and has the 2.5-inch form factor to suit them, although they're still pretty thin at 7mm.
Speaking of which, the new series of drives are normal enough in looks, with pale gray cases and 6 Gbps SATA interfaces.
They are optimized for reading tasks, in tune with their intended purpose of storage units for low-duty storage applications, read-caching, error logging, boot and end-to-end data protection.
Thus, the sequential read speed is of 500 MB/s and the writing speed is of 400 MB/s (280 MB/s on the 120 GB model).
On that note, there are three storage capacities, of 120 GB, 240 GB and 480 GB, bearing part numbers THNSNJ120PCS3, THNSNJ240PCS3 and THNSNJ480PCS3, respectively.
Moving on, the random read 4K speed is of 75,000 IOPs, while the write speed is of 12,000 IOPS (10,000 IOPS on the 120 GB drive).
Furthermore, the endurance is of 2,000,000 hours MTTF (mean time to failure, measures average time to failures with the modeling assumption that the failed system is not repaired).
“Toshiba recognizes the importance of eSSD reliability and designs our eSSDs with full power loss protection and QSBC error protection technology to put our customers’ minds at ease,” said Don Jeanette, senior director of marketing at Toshiba Storage Products Business Unit.
“Toshiba understands that keeping enterprise data safe and accessible is of the upmost importance.”
The Toshiba HK3R enterprise SSD series has a 5-year warranty and power loss protection. Samples will ship this month (December 2013), but prices aren't known.