HGST Ultrastar SS200 SSD: Up to 7.68 TB, 1.8 GB/s, Dual-Port SAS 12 Gbps

Western Digital has introduced a new family of Ultrastar SS200 SAS SSDs that wed high-performance with capacities up to 7.68 TB as well as relatively high endurance. The drives are aimed at mixed-use and read-intensive workloads that require not only maximum throughput, but also reliability. To guarantee the latter, the Ultrastar SS200 uses the company's Guardian technology.

The HGST Ultrastar SS200-series SSDs are designed for datacenters that rely on SAS backplanes, which are used for modern read-intensive and mixed-use workloads that benefit from performance and reliability (e.g., financial transactions, e-commerce, virtualization, database analytics, etc.). The drives come in 2.5”/15 mm form-factor with two SAS 12 Gbps ports and are based on the Guardian platform originally developed by SanDisk. The Guardian technology handles flash management, signal processing, end-to-end data path protection, power-loss protection and so on. Unlike the previous-gen products featuring the Guardian, the Ultrastar SS200 SSDs are based on a proprietary Western Digital controller and firmware, not a third-party chip with a custom firmware, the company told us. The manufacturer claims that the SS200 drives use “commercial-grade” MLC NAND memory, which probably means 128 Gbit ICs made using 15 nm fabrication process.

Since different workloads mean different demands for capacities and endurance, Western Digital plans to offer capacity-optimized versions of the SS200 that can store 480 GB – 7.68 TB of data and rated for one drive write per day (DWPD) for five years as well as endurance- and performance-optimized models rated at 3 DWPD for five years that can store 400 GB – 3.2 TB of data. Power consumption of the Ultrastar SS200 SSDs is configurable and can be as low as 9 W or as high as 11 W.

When it comes to performance, the HGST Ultrastar SS200 supports sequential read speeds of up to 1800 MB/s as well as sequential write speeds of up to 1000 MB/s. Random read performance of the Ultrastar SS200 is up to 250K, whereas random write performance is rated at 86K/37K (performance-/capacity-optimized models).

Samples of the HGST Ultrastar SS200 SAS lineup of SSDs are available to select customers now and Western Digital intends to begin their volume shipments in the first quarter of 2017. The drives will be covered with a five-year warranty and will be rated at 2.5 million-hour MTBF.

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