Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) has begun shipping the industry’s first solid-state drives that use 25nm single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash. The Ultrastar SSD400S.B family combines Hitachi’s enterprise hard disk drive (HDD) expertise with Intel’s high-endurance SLC NAND flash memory and advanced SSD technology.

“The transition to the latest 25nm SLC NAND from Intel reinforces the commitment of both companies to deliver outstanding performance and endurance in the Ultrastar SSD400S.B family. Our collaboration with Hitachi GST continues to deliver leading enterprise-class SSD solutions that are critical to building Tier 0 solutions for the enterprise," said Rob Crooke, Intel vice president and general manager of the Intel non-volatile memory solutions group.

The new Ultrastar SSD400S.B family is available in 100GB, 200GB and 400GB capacities, and features 2.5" form-factor and 6Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interface. The new Ultrastar SSD400S.B family delivers the industry’s highest SSD sequential throughput, up to 536MB/s read and 502MB/s write throughput with 6Gb/s SAS. The new drive also delivers up to 57 500 read and 25 500 sustained write IOPS, reaching speeds 100 times faster than traditional enterprise hard drives, resulting in rapid response times for real-time transaction processing access to “hot” enterprise data for improved productivity and operational efficiency.

The Ultrastar SSD400S.B family combines enterprise-grade NAND flash, proprietary endurance firmware and power loss management techniques to extend the reliability, endurance and sustained performance of the new SSD family. The 400GB SSD can endure up to 35PB of random writes over the life of the drive, which is the equivalent of writing 19.2TB/day for five years, ensuring greater utilization and reliability in the most demanding enterprise environments. For complete end-to-end data protection and reliability, the Ultrastar SSD400S family includes advanced data integrity and power loss management technologies that are tied with industry standards to ensure compatibility in multi-tiered SSD/HDD system designs.

Hitachi’s optional self-encrypting drive (SED) technology fully supported by Ultrastar SSD400S.B family  provides hardware-based data security and enhanced secure erase capability. Self-encrypting drives scramble data using a key as it is written to the disk, and then descramble it with the key as it is retrieved, giving users the highest level of data protection available. Further, system performance is improved because the encryption workload is moved off the processor and chipset and onto the drive. The drives also conform to the Trusted Computing Group’s enterprise A security subsystem class encryption specification, helping customers protect sensitive data, and reduce the costs associated with drive retirement and reuse.

“Security is a growing concern among enterprise customers, especially those in financial services, e-commerce and online transaction processing. Our solid state drives are designed to deliver the highest level of performance, while reducing total cost of ownership.  With our new 25nm SLC SSDs, our enterprise customers now have the highest level of data protection in an SSD without compromising system performance, reliability and endurance,” said Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing at Hitachi GST.

Hitachi GST has already shipped and is currently qualifying its Ultrastar SSD400S.B drives with select OEMs. Broader qualification samples are now available with product ramp scheduled in the first half of 2012. The Ultrastar SSD400S.B comes with or without an encryption option and is backed by a five-year limited warranty, or the maximum petabytes written (based on capacity).

Tags: Hitachi, Intel, SLC, 25nm, NAND, Flash