Toshiba’s storage division announced a family
of enterprise-class solid state drives with low power requirements on
Dec. 14.
Toshiba’s new MK x001GRZB series 2.5 inch SSD
drives use the company’s 32nm enterprise grade single-level cell NAND
flash memory and a 6 Gb/sec serial attached SCSI interface.
“Toshiba stands alone in the market as the only
SSD supplier that is vertically integrated for NAND flash and has deep
enterprise HDD expertise,” said Joel Hagberg, vice-president of
enterprise marketing at Toshiba Storage Device Division.
Toshiba has a lot of control over the
components that goes into its SSDs, with its own NAND flash fab
facilities, controller and firmware design teams, and “critical
interface technologies,” said Hagberg.
The enterprise-class drives will be available
in 100GB, 200GB and 400GB storage capacities, Toshiba said. These
drives are designed for new or existing tier-0 enterprise storage
systems and hardware, including servers, direct-attached storage, and
network-attached storage, the company said.
The new drives can manage sequential sustained
510 MB/second read and 230 MB/second write throughput rates. The
company also reported 90,000 read and 17,000 write input/output
operations per second.
The SSDs require only 6.5 watts of power,
making them on-par with the Seagate Barracuda Green, the latest
eco-friendly hard disk drive from Seagate Technologies.
The 200GB and 400GB drives have a guaranteed
lifespan of five years with no limit on write operations, said Toshiba.
The 100 GB has an 8 petabyte limit on the total number of write
operations over five years.
“The performance and energy benefits of SSDs
can outwiegh the cost difference compared to HDDs, and many
organizations will want to use solid state technology for applications
that require extremely fast data access,” said Joseph Unsworth,
research director of Gartner.
The drives also include features such as error
correction, rotational vibration compensation technology for
multi-drive systems, and enhanced power condition state technology to
ensure the drives are operating optimally at all times, Toshiba
said.
Toshiba will be shipping samples of the new
SSDs for equipment manufacturers to qualify with products in the first
quarter of 2011. The drives will go into volume production in the first
half of 2011, said Toshiba. Pricing was not disclosed.
Toshiba doesn’t use catchy product names such as the ones Western Digital selected for broad consumer market drives like Caviar Green and Scorpio Blue, because the MKx001GRZB it is built to work in enterprises with high-performance computing environments.
These drives will likely compete with
Seagate and Hitachi’s joint Ultrastar SSD offering. UltraStor comes in
the same storage sizes, but features both SAS and Fibre Channel
interfaces.
“The total share of the enterprise market
that uses SSDs will remain relatively small until at least 2013,” said
Unsworth. Storage suppliers who can offer customers a unified product
line with both SSD and HDD technologies will “gain the most” from the
shift, he said.
Toshiba acquired Fujitsu’s hard drive business last year.
For businesses looking for higher reliability
and high capacity than what is currently available on SSDs, Toshiba
also included the new MKx001TRKB and MKx002TSKB hard disk drives in its
enterprise storage lineup. These 3.5-inch 7200 rpm drives have a
capacity of 2TB with SAS and SATA interfaces.
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