HGST rolls out its Ultrastar 12Gb/s SAS solid-state drives with capacities up to 1.6TB

New Delhi, India, July 30, 2014: HGST, a Western Digital company, today launched its next-generation of Ultrastar 12Gb/s SAS solid-state drives (SSDs) with capacities up to 1.6TB. Building upon its award-winning first generation 12Gb/s SAS SSDs, the new Ultrastar SSD800MH.B, Ultrastar SSD1600MM and Ultrastar SSD1600MR are the ideal building blocks for server and storage systems running today’s performance-sensitive enterprise applications.

The Ultrastar SAS SSDs create new price/performance points by combining HGST’s deep enterprise storage expertise developed over the last 50 years, HGST’s customer-proven 12Gb/s SAS technology and Intel’s 20 nanometer (nm) high endurance enterprise-grade MLC NAND memory. As a result, HGST’s Ultrastar SAS SSDs excel in key total cost of ownership (TCO) metrics for enterprise applications, including transactions/$ and transactions/watt.

The new high performance Ultrastar 12Gb/s SAS SSD family supports applications requiring fast and reliable data storage, such as online transaction processing, cloud computing, online gaming, and big data analytics. Its features and benefits include:

• Enterprise-level write endurance –Three options to balance write endurance, write performance, and cost: Ultrastar SSD800MH.B with 25 full random drive writes per day (DW/D), for five years, Ultrastar SSD1600MM with 10 DW/D, and Ultrastar SSD1600MR for read-intensive applications.
• Highest level of product reliability – Continuing HGST’s industry-leading track record in enterprise storage quality with a reliability specification of 2 million hours MTBF and a five-year limited warranty.
• Broad range of capacities – Available in capacities of 250GB to 1.6TB for the read-intensive Ultrastar SSD1600MR, 200GB to 1.6TB for the mainstream endurance Ultrastar SSD1600MM, and 100GB to 800GB for the high endurance Ultrastar SSD800MH.B.
• High performance levels – Supports throughputs of up to 1,100 MB/s along with random read and random write performance of up to 130,000 and 110,000 IOPS, respectively.
• Choice of security options – A comprehensive set of data security options including Instant Secure Erase (ISE), Self-Encrypting Drives (SED), and TCG enterprise SED with FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standard) 140-2 certification.

Ulrich Hansen, Vice President of SSD product marketing, HGST, said, “HGST leads the industry in SAS SSDs, which continue to be the preferred storage building blocks for a large variety of server and storage systems that support a growing set of data-intensive enterprise applications. As our OEM, cloud and enterprise customers implement solutions to meet a variety of storage needs, SSDs and HDDs will increasingly be deployed in tiered pools of storage based on respective TCO strengths. HGST is in a unique position of offering a complete enterprise storage portfolio with leading solutions in both product categories.”

“The adoption of Intel 20nm enterprise-grade MLC NAND illustrates the commitment of both companies to continue to develop outstanding performance and endurance in the Ultrastar SAS SSD family,” said Rob Crooke, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group. “With the new HGST Ultrastar SAS SSD family, customers are offered higher performance and the ability to develop a broad range of application acceleration solutions.”

Since 2008, HGST and Intel have worked to develop SAS SSDs by combining HGST’s enterprise storage experience with Intel’s NAND Flash expertise.

The new HGST Ultrastar SSD800MH.B, Ultrastar SSD1600MM and Ultrastar SSD1600MR SAS SSDs are currently completing qualifications at several server and storage system OEMs, and are generally available now.