Toshiba shows off SSDs

JAPANESE HARDWARE MAKER Toshiba is showing off a family of enterprise-class solid state disk (SSD) drives that it claims can manage higher performance and lower power consumption.

The imaginatively titled MK x001GRZB series 2.5-inch SSD drives use Toshiba's 32nm enterprise grade single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash memory and have a 6Gb/sec Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interface.

The SSDs are available in 100GB, 200GB, and 400GB and are designed for new or existing tier-0 enterprise storage systems and hardware, including servers, direct-attached storage and network-attached storage.

The drives can manage random sustained 90,000 read and 17,000 write IOPS and sequential sustained 510MB/sec read and 230MB/sec write throughput rates, Toshiba claims.

This performance is three times faster than Toshiba's current enterprise hard disk drives and the SSDs also require only 6.5 Watts of power.

Apparently the SSD drives will be released some time next year. There's no word on prices yet. µ