Toshiba Announces SAS Interface Solid State Drive for Servers

Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. (TAEC) announced the expansion of its line up of NAND-flash-based solid state drives (SSD) into the enterprise storage market with the company's first Single Level Cell (SLC) NAND-based SSDs. The drives feature the serial attached SCSI (SAS) interface, which is expected to gain momentum in the high-performance enterprise storage market in 2009. Toshiba's new enterprise SSDs address market demands for the performance advantages and power savings of solid state storage for applications in servers, direct-attached storage and network-attached storage.

Toshiba's initial enterprise SSD lineup utilizes the company's latest high endurance SLC NAND and will offer random Input/Output operations Per Second (IOPS) up to 25,000/20,000 for a 4Kbyte data block size read/write, and storage capacities of up to 100 gigabyte (GB). The drives will be available in 2.5-inch Small Form Factor and offer many enterprise features, such as dual ported SAS redundancy and non-volatile cache. Samples of the new drives will be available in late first quarter of 2009, with mass production in the second quarter.

"SLC NAND solid state drives in the enterprise space offer a significant value proposition, achieving lower $/IOPS, which until now was not economically possible," said Scott Nelson, vice president memory, for TAEC. "Our enterprise-class SSDs are targeted for use in business critical applications that require storage performance only available from solid state drives, such as Tier 0 virtual memory in storage arrays. In this environment, an SSD solution provides a more cost effective solution in the mix of traditional high speed memory cache and multiple 'short-stroke' hard disk drives."

"The total cost of ownership advantages that SSDs provide in enterprise solutions are especially attractive to end customers," Nelson continued. "The operational power savings of solid state drive technology over HDD, in terms of watts consumed to operate and cool, is calculated to be about 240 percent less for SLC and up to 800 percent less using MLC SSD, and supports the trend toward 'greener' data centers."

"The enterprise market is poised to reap the dramatic benefits of SSDs and the development of a SAS-based SSD is an important milestone in the adoption of NAND flash in storage arrays," said Michael Cornwell, lead technologist for flash memory at Sun. "As a leader in flash-based storage solutions, Sun is pleased to collaborate with Toshiba to provide customers with new SAS-based SSD options that accelerate performance and increase efficiency while lowering power consumption."

Toshiba, as the inventor of NAND Flash, will continue drive innovations that widen the horizons of the NAND Flash in the emerging enterprise solid state storage market. The company will spur demand for SSDs in enterprise applications, notebook PCs, netbooks, laptops and digital consumer products by enhancing its lineup, offering products with different densities and interfaces in a range of packages, while advancing device performance.

Outline of the new product:

Form Factor: 2.5 inch
Capacity: 50/100GB
Product Number: THNS064GF8BEAA
Samples Available: late Q1/09
Start of Mass Production: Q2/09