The release of a new first enterprise-class Solid State drives (SSD) with transfer rates ranging to 510Mb/sec has been announced by Toshiba. Coming with a complicated and difficult to pronounce name, the MKx001GRZB drives claim to possess some of the fastest drive speeds which are serial attached to SCSI (SAS). These are faster than any other variant in the market.

A single level cell (SLC) NANO using a 32- nanometer (NM) lithography technology and 6Gbit/sec SAS connectivity are main elements of the 2.5 inch form factor. Shipping of the samples of the new drives to equipment manufacturers for qualifying with their products will begin in the first quarter next year, the company said. The first half of 2011 will see the initial stages of the volume production.

The drives come in 100GB, 200GB, and 400GB capacities. They are being marketed as ‘Tier 0’ offerings to many producers of the enterprise class-storage subsystems as well as high end servers. The new SSD line is furnished to achieve a maximum random sustained read of 90,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS) and 17,000 write IOPS, allowing to the company. They also remarked that the maximum sequential sustained read rate of the drives is close to 510 MB/sec and 230MB/sec for write throughput.

This is in stark comparison to the announcement by Hitachi and Seagate about the joint development of their own enterprise-class SSD line, named the Ultrastar SSD400S family.This line from the Hitachi-Seagate collaboration includes a 100 GB, 200GB and 400 GB models which are equipped with both 2.5 inch 6Gbit/sec SAS and a 3.5 inch 4Gbit/sec Fibre Channel (FC) interfaces with full duplex. causesstochastic

There has also been a boast of a maximum sequential read rate of 535 MB/sec and a 500confirmed MB/sec, with a write rate up to 46,000 IOS per second using the SAS interface. These drives are also said to reach up to 390 MB/sec read and 340 MB/sec write rates using the Fibre Channel interface. The low power capacity of the new SSD line was emphasized by Toshiba. They added that these drives use only 6.5 watts during read/write operations.

An analyst at Gartner Inc, Joseph Unsworth added that the functioning and Energy Department gains of the SSDs overbalance the cost divergence in equality to hard disk drives. This solid-state engineering will be chose by many organizations expecting to use them in applications requiring speedy data access. However, the overall share of the mart which will continue to use these SSDs will stay small in comparison until 2013, he added.

Unsworth also added that hardware vendors supplying both hard disks and SSDs as a unified product line would enjoy most success. This is mainly due to the popularity of the tiered storage architectures where data is placed according to its priority. To this end there has been an announcement made by Toshiba about two new enterprise-class hard disk drive series: the MKx001TRKB and the MKx002TSKB lines.

These drives with 7200 rpm come in capacities of 1TB and 2TB with a 3.5 inch form factor and 6Gbit/sec. SAS3 and also 3Gbit/sec Serial ATA (SATA) interfaces. The drives also come equipped with buffer memory ranging from 16MB to 64 MB. These drives have been created with 24 hour operations in mind. The two new series of drives also possess onboard Error Correction Code (ECC). There hasn’t been any pricing suggested for these lines by Toshiba for now.