Hitachi releases first 25nm SLC SSDs for storage arrays

Computerworld - Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (GST) Wednesday unveiled what it calls the first enterprise-class, single-level cell NAND flash solid-state drive (SSD) that uses 25 nanometer technology.

The new Ultrastar SSD400S.B is a 2.5-in form factor SSD using a serial attached SCSI (SAS) 6Gbps interface. It comes in 100GB-, 200GB- and 400GB-capacity versions.

Other vendors have produced 25nm SSDs using multi-level cell (MLC) technology and serial ATA interfaces. SAS drives are more resilient because they are dual ported allowing for failover if one port goes bad.

Hitachi's new Ultrastar SSD

The new Ultrastar drives come with native encryption capability.

"Security is a growing concern among enterprise customers, especially those in financial services, e-commerce and online transaction processing," Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing for Hitachi GST, said in a statement. "Our solid state drives are designed to deliver the highest level of performance."

Hitachi is using SLC NAND from Intel. The SLC NAND flash, while more expensive, has vastly greater native performance and reliability compared with MLC drives, which require special software to increase their longevity and reliability.

A 400GB model of the Ultrastar SSD can endure up to 35 petabytes (PB) of random writes over the life of the drive, Hitachi GST said. That's the equivalent of writing 19.2TB/day for five years.

The Ultrastar SSD400S.B delivers up to 536MB/sec sequential read rates and 502MB/sec sequential write rates. It can deliver up to 57,500 sustained random read I/Os per second (IOPS) and 25,500 sustained random write IOPS.

Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian, or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed . His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com.

Read more about Storage in Computerworld's Storage Topic Center.