WDC’s HGST Intros 12G SAS MLC SSDs

Latencey Histogram of HGST's MLC SSDIn case you didn’t have enough abbreviations in your life, The SSD Guy brings you the headline above, with the promise that the news below is really interesting: HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technology, but now a division of WDC – Western Digital Corp.) has brought out a new line of 12Gb/s SAS SSDs based on MLC flash.  These are a part of the UltraStar line.

Whereas HGST’s first-generation UltraStar SAS SSDs used SLC flash, the new SSDs are based on 25nm MLC flash but offer the same warranties as HGST’s prior generation.  Even so, performance for the new SSDs is significantly faster than that of their SLC-based predecessors, with no reduction in wear or lifetime specifications.

These SSDs are the first to support Continue reading “WDC’s HGST Intros 12G SAS MLC SSDs”

How Many IOPS Do You Really Need?

From Report: "How Many IOPS Do You Really Need?"

IT professionals find it difficult to determine which SSD or flash array to buy or even whether they can get the speed they need from standard HDDs.  There is an extraordinarily wide rage of IOPS (from hundreds to millions), latencies, and capacities, and this can be confusing.  A new Objective Analysis report: How Many IOPS Do You Really Need provides, through a survey of IT managers and other end users, an understanding of the performance needs of various applications including IOPS, latency, and capacity.

This report answers questions that have never previously Continue reading “How Many IOPS Do You Really Need?”

SandForce: The Cloud needs Different SSDs

SandForceOn Monday December 13 SandForce introduced SSD controllers designed specifically for cloud computing applications.

You might wonder what is so different about cloud applications that they need an SSD controller of their own.  SandForce makes some interesting points:

  1. Cloud applications need low latency
  2. Cloud computing centers, like client SSDs, need a lot of capacity at a very low price Continue reading “SandForce: The Cloud needs Different SSDs”