Hitachi’s New 2nd Generation SAS SSDs

Hitachi UltraStar SSD400S.BToday Hitachi announced the company’s second generation Ultrastar SSD400S.B family, which Hitachi claims to be the industry’s first 25nm SLC enterprise-class SSD family.

This comes only two days after Intel announced a 25nm MLC SSDIntel‘s highest-performance SSD to date.

The new Hitachi SSDs support a SAS 6Gb/s dual port interface. SLC NAND flash was chosen for its high write performance and endurance.

Maximum sequential read speeds of 536MB/s and a sequential write speed of up to 520MB/s with 57K random read IOPS and 25K random write IOPS help to give ultra-fast access to data.

Hitachi and Intel are partners in SSDs.  Intel supplies Hitachi’s NAND flash, and the Hitachi controllers are based upon Intel’s proprietary SSD controller architecture.

These 2.5″ SSDs are currently shipping in 100, 200, & 400GB capacities.

Few companies ship SAS SSDs today: Hitachi, Seagate, Pliant (now SanDisk), STEC, and OCZ.

Objective Analysis publishes an annual report on enterprise SSDs.  The report: The Enterprise SSD: Technologies & Markets, can be purchased online for immediate download from the Objective Analysis website.