Hitachi announces ultra-fast SSDs
Hitachi's new SSDs feature speeds of over 500MB/s - but expect to pay a significant premium.
The Hitachi UltraStar SSD400S series, available in 400GB, 200GB, and 100GB capacities, are aimed firmly at the high-performance enterprise grade market. Dispensing with the usual SATA connectivity, two versions will be offered: a 2.5in model featuring 6Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) connectivity, and a 3.5in version with 4Gb/s fibre channel.
The performance figures Hitachi has released for the drives are mind-blowingly impressive. The SLC-based devices can reach up to 535MB/s read and 500MB/s write on a single drive through the SAS connection, or a still impressive 390MB/s read and 340MB/s write on the FCAL edition. Read and write IOPS are up there with the best, too, at 46,000 and 13,000 respectively based on random 4K blocks.
Both drives are extremely power efficient, lacking moving parts, with Hitachi rating the devices at a mere 5.5W typical operating draw - a significant saving in power and cooling requirements for storage-heavy data centres.
The company's first drive is clearly a performance winner, but there's one very important piece of information missing from Hitachi's announcement: the price. With SLC NAND flash fetching a considerable premium over the more common MLC variant, the included five-year warranty, and Hitachi's obvious aim at the high-end enterprise market with the lack of a SATA option, expect to pay through the nose for these drives.
Are you amazed at the performance Hitachi has managed to squeeze out of the drives, or dismissive of the announcement until the company comes clean about pricing? Share your thoughts over in the forums.
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Discuss in the forums ReplyWould like to know pricing asap, although I expect out of my reach.
I even bought into a 10k Raptor and my normal 7200rpm 1TB smokes it in speed other than small file transfers. Waste of money.
I currently own a pair of SF-1200 based 60gb OCZs in a RAID 0 array and they scored 7.9 on windows index. If you just want the 7.9 score itself you may wanna buy something right now instead of getting that Hitachi SSD.
i really don't understand why sata3 isn't being used as much. if sata is backwards compatible, why not just use the fastest?
From what I read though they have a 960GB drive for the low low price of about 2500 EUR.
The WEI is a pretty useless number tbh.
I'd like to know what controller they're using, but that information has been suspiciously left out of this news article. It's not even postulated what controller is being used.
SSD aren't about capacity and won't be for quite a long time. SSD are made for OS and apps not data storage
Nope.
Physically fit, maybe. Work - not at all. You need a SAS port for a SAS drive to work.
The other way round does work, SAS controllers are compatible with SATA drives.
Why do you care what windows thinks of your storage medium?
OCZ do a much faster drive, the Z-Drive. Top rated model is 2TB with read/write speeds of 1400/1400 mb/s. Insane speeds using MLC-Flash in an 8 way RAID setup. Not just intended for enterprise either, the Z-drive is 8XPCIe. Of course, you would have to pay over £6500 for the thing, but imagine how fast Windows would boot lol.