Only four days after announcing the company’s acquisition of Link_A_Media SK Hynix has announced its entry into the Client SSD market. The company’s new 2.5″ SATA III self-encrypting drive (SED) will ship in 128GB and 256 GB capacities and boasts serial read speeds of 510MB/s, writing at 470MB/s. Random 4kB performance is said to be 55k IOPS read and 85k IOPS write. It’s interesting that the write performance is higher than the read performance – not many SSDs perform this way.
Although this drive is said to be a client SSD, it supports end-to-end data protection, a feature more common to enterprise SSDs. More specifications are listed on SK Hynix’ SSD website. The benchmarks on this website are of particular interest, since SK Hynix claims that its IOPS/Watt in mixed workloads is significantly better than that of certain competing SSDs.
The company tells us that the new SSD uses ONFi flash. So far the only supporters of ONFi are Intel, Micron, and SK Hynix. All three companies harness the speed of this interface to produce very fast SSDs.
The SSD Guy had heard that Hynix was shipping SSDs into the Korea market about four years ago, but this announcement appears to discredit that rumor. SK Hynix does say that it has been shipping mSATA drives for embedded applications since late last year, but indicates that there were no previous SSDs in the company’s history.
Objective Analysis covers the client SSD market and other SSD markets in its report: Solid State Disk Market Outlook which can be purchased for immediate download from our website.
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