Western Digital's HGST, the former storage division of Hitachi, has developed SSDs with the SAS-1200 interface. This interface is twice as fast as the SAS-600 interface which is commonly used on enterprise and server SSDs. The drives using the SAS-1200 interface will be available in three versions.
Each version has its own strong points. The High Endurance Ultrastars SSD8000MH series are targeted at servers that get a lot of writes. According to the specifications these drives can handle 25 times their own capacity in writes for 5 year, every day.
The Mainstream Endurance Ultrastar SSD8000MM are able to handle 10 times their own capacity in writes but are a bit slower than the High Endurance Ultrastars. The Read Intensive Ultrastar SSD1000MR drives are targeted at systems that mainly deal with reads. During their five year life-cycle (and warranty) then can handle two times their capacity of writes for five years, every day.
The High Endurance drives are available in capacities of 800 GB, 400 GB and 200 GB and are able to achieve read speeds of up to 1200 MB/s and write speeds of up to 750 MB/s. The Mainstream Endurance SSDs are available in the same capacities and their maximum write speed is 700 MB/s. The Read Intensive drives are available in capacities of 250 GB, 500 GB and 1 TB and have a maximum read speed of 1200 MB/s and maximum write speed of 700 MB/s.
All drives contain 25nm MLC NAND. The SAS-1200 interface is developed by Hitachi and LSI. While the SAS-1200 interface is twice as fast as SAS-600 it's backwards compatible. First samples of the drives have been made available to a select amount of OEMs. In June the SSDs should become available on the market, by then also versions that support encryption should be released.
