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Western Digital Announces HGST Ultrastar SS300 12Gbps SAS SSD

Western Digital announces their latest addition to the line-up with the new HGST Ultrastar 12Gbps SAS SSD. The new drive is the company’s highest-performing SAS SSD to date. It was developed in partnership with Intel and the new Ultrastar SS300 delivers best-in-class random performance: Up to 400,000 IOPS random read and up to 200,000 IOPS random write.

“Today, we raise the bar with our newest 12Gb/s SAS SSD, the Ultrastar SS300,” said Ulrich Hansen, vice president of SSD product marketing at Western Digital Corporation. “Built with high-endurance 3D NAND flash memory, the Ultrastar SS300 offers best-in-class speed, outstanding capacity and intelligent power options that enable customers to tailor storage systems and server solutions that are just right for their demanding needs. These benefits are delivered with the same tremendous reliability that has helped to make Ultrastar 12Gb/s SAS SSDs popular around the globe.”

The new series is designed with virtualised storage systems, databases, and hybrid cloud environments in mind

NAND Type and Capacity Options

The new HGST Ultrastar SS300 series comes in various types, both capacity wise and NAND wise. There are 3D MLC NAND models and there are 3D TLC NAND models available. Naturally, the MLC models provide the better endurance and write performance, but TLC models will be cheaper and offer more capacity.

The capacity options start at 400GB for the MLC models and the capacity doubles each time until we get to 3.2TB. The TLC models start at 480GB and end in impressive 7.68TB capacity. And that in a 2.5-inch form factor.

Drive Performance and Endurance

Thanks to the SAS interface, the SS300 series is able to deliver impressive performance results. The sequential read performance of all models to reach an impressive 2100MB/s. The MLC models can write just as fast, but the TLC models drop down to about 1200MB/s write speed. The random read IOPS also reach the same goal on all models, 400K. The write performance on the MLC models reaches 200K while the TLC models hang around the 120K IOPS. Still, impressive.

Each model comes with four endurance choices, from 0.5 to 10 drive writes per day.

Power Modes

The SSD series also comes with power settings and this includes a 14-watt power envelope that can unlock additional performance. Other power settings include 9 and 11W. Users will get higher IOPS performance with higher power options while lower settings feature a more efficient energy consumption.

Features

Naturally, a drive series like the SS300 comes with a lot of feature options. They offer a choice of security such as Instant Secure Erase (ISE) and it is Self-Encrypting Drive (SED)-compliant with TCG Enterprise as well as SED-compliant with TCG Enterprise with FIPS 140-2 certification.