Before the discussion about the news in detail, its important to know what actually a solid state drive is. This is basically a device for the data storage which stores the relevant data by using the solid state memory. All are aware of the hard disk drives that they are electromechanical devices with spinning disks and read/write heads which are movable. But these solid state drives are different from hard disk drives. SSD’s makes the use of microchips and does not have any moving parts. These are much better than hard disk drives and so keep the capability of replacing the hard disk drives in most of the applications.
Some good features of solid state drive is that it use the flash memory which is NAND based that retains the memory even if there is no power. If any situation occurs that more faster access is required but does not compulsorily require data after power loss or makes the use of battery for backing up the data ,then SSD’s with volatile RAM also exists.
Introduction of first enterprise solid state drive by Hitachi GST:
There was a uValue convention 2010 held in Tokyo this year in which Hitachi Global Storage Technologies has declared about its first enterprise solid state drives.
Features of this new product:
This product will have SAS (Sports Serial Attached SCSI) and FCAL (Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop) interfaces which will help it to fit in the 2.5 inch form factor disk drive slot in a Fibre Channel or SAS disk drive array claiming to give the best performance. At presentFibre Channel interface SSDs with the ZeusIOPS line which is available in different form factors is only supplied by STEC. The model is basically meant for the enterprise drive array manufacturers. But still one thing is not clear that whether this new solid state drive is a single layer cell or multi layer cell NAND flash memory chips, but it is expected that SLC should be used as its faster as compared to MLC. There is an uncertainty regarding the capacity points also but is expected to reach up to 512GB. Currently, only STEC is selling the solid-state drives with FC and SAS interfaces, so Hitachi will not have to face much competition and can favorably stay in the market.
Promise to start shipment in 2010:
There was an announcement in the year 2008 that Hitachi GST and Intel will collaborate and will work together on the enterprise-class solid-state drives and claimed to launch it and give its delivery in first half of 2010. But they could not keep their promise, may be because of the economic slowdown at global level but now Hitachi GST has claimed that it will definitely start the shipment of this new product in second half of 2010. This product might be branded as UltraStar. So this product by Hitachi GST is basically intended for use in the enterprise drive arrays and people are now expecting it to get the delivery of same by the end of 2010.
