Hitachi shows off 12Gbit/s SAS SSD drive

STORAGE VENDOR Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST) has shown off the first 12Gbit/s serial attached SCSI (SAS) solid state disk (SSD) drive.

Now part of Western Digital, HGST demonstrated an SSD that uses a 12Gbit/s SAS interface. According to HGST the next generation SAS interface will allow for transfer rates of up to 4.8GB/s, which should provide ample headroom for current generation enterprise SSDs.

Although HGST didn't give any indication of when a SAS 12Gbit/s SSD will actually appear, the firm said it will be a drop-in upgrade for current generation SAS 6Gbit/s drives. According to the firm the demonstration drive works with host bus adaptors from LSI and PMC-Sierra, owners of the Adaptec brand.

Brendan Collins, VP of product marketing at HGST talked up the drive's support of existing hardware, saying, "Meeting these interoperability milestones is critical when preparing the industry for the adoption of a new interface standard. We will continue to promote broad industry support for 12Gbit/s SAS."

Enterprise SSDs can already push 1GB/s and while some firms have turned to the PCI-Express bus for increased bandwidth, SAS has been the industry standard for enterprise storage for some years, taking over from SCSI. Although the PCI-Express bus might still hold a performance advantage, it is far cheaper to implement eight SAS 12Gbit/s channels.

LSI provided some idea of when 12Gbit/s SAS drives will appear when Bill Wuertz, SVP and GM of LSI's RAID Storage Division claimed that market adoption of the interface and its supporting storage drives will happen by 2013. µ