Hitachi storage arm launches enterprise SSDs

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies has entered the enterprise solid-state drive market on with the Ultrastar family of drives.

The SSD400S Ultrastar drives come in 100GB, 200GB and 400GB variants. Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) collaborated with Intel on developing the 34nm Nand flash memory for the drives, along with other "advanced SSD technology", Hitachi GST said on Tuesday.

The drives will ship in two different interface varieties; 2.5-inch 6Gbps Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and 3.5-inch 4Gbps fibre channel (FC). The drives are capable of 46,000 read and 13,000 sustained write input/output operations per second (IOPS), which Hitachi says is a hundred times faster than traditional spinning disk hard drives.

"Our new SSD product family not only symbolises our market opportunity to serve evolving cloud datacentre infrastructures, but also delivers value to our customers in terms of increasing datacentre performance and reducing total cost of ownership," Mike Cordano, Hitachi's vice president of worldwide sales and marketing said in a statement.

The drives have a throughput of 535 MBps read and 500 MBps write using 6Gbps SAS and 390 MBps read and 340 MBps write with 4 Gbps FC. Hitachi GST believes the drive has the highest throughput in the industry. The drives have a lifespan of five years, or roughly 35 petabytes worth of write operations, according to Hitachi GST.

Hitachi GST expect the drives to be used at the top tier of a company's data provisioning infrastructure for data that needs to be accessed quickly, Manfred Berger, a senior product strategist for Hitachi GST, told ZDNet UK on Monday.

There is no public pricelist for the drives available as of yet, but the drives may begin at around $10,000 (£6,252), Berger said.