Hitachi Global Storage Technologies has demonstrated its first solid-state drives (SSDs) at Hitachi uValue 2010 trade-show for the first time. The company did not reveal any concrete details, but a claim on its web-site vows that the company will start shipments in the second half of 2010, which is a noticeable delay from the original plan.

The first enterprise SSD family from Hitachi GST comes in 2.5" form-factor and sports Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) or Fibre-Channel Arbitrated Loop (FCAL) interfaces, reports The Register web-site. It is unclear whether the new drives are based on single-layer cell (SLC) or multi-layer cell (MLC) NAND flash, but considering their positioning it is more likely that more reliable and rapid SLC is used. Capacity points are also unclear at the moment.

Back in late 2008 Hitach-GST and Intel announced collaboration to jointly work on enterprise-class solid-state drives and promised to deliver the first actual products in the first half of 2010. The new SSDs will be branded and exclusively sold and supported by Hitachi GST and use Intel NAND flash memory and SSD technology. Perhaps, the global economy crisis has impacted the execution of the roadmap, but at present HGST vows to start shipments of the new SSDs in the second half of 2010.

At present solid-state drives with FC and SAS interfaces are only sold by STEC, hence, Hitachi will be in a pretty favourable position on that market. But it should be noted that Hitachi-GST is also the only hard disk drive (HDD) maker that does not produce its own SSDs for consumers, workstations and other markets.

Tags: Hitachi-GST, Flash, SSD, Intel, NAND