HGST Announces Scorching Fast NVMe PCI Express Ultrastar SSDs In Capacities Up To 3.2TB

When solid-state drives are unencumbered by the SATA interface, beautiful things can happen. Look no further than the Intel SSD 750 Series, which we reviewed two weeks ago, to see what kind of performance is achievable with an NVMe PCI Express interface.

If you can actually believe it, HGST, a Western Digital company, has actually announced a new NVMe PCI Express SSD that is rated faster than even Intel’s new barnstormer. But to be fair, the Intel SSD 750 Series is aimed at the consumer/prosumer market whereas the new HGST Ultrastar SN100 is aimed squarely at the enterprise market.

The HGST Ultrastar SN100 Series will be offered in both HH-HL and SFF 2.5-inch form-factors in capacities up to a whopping 3.2TB. Naturally, the SSDs support UEFI boot, PCIe Gen 3.0, and feature power fail protection, “enterprise-grade reliability,” and secure erase. HGST is targeting the Ultrastar SN100 series at a number of sectors including virtualized computing, high frequency trading, and cloud/hyperscale/enterprise/high performance computing.

Whether you opt for the HH-HL add-in card (SN150) or the SFF 2.5-inch form-factor (SN100), you will still get the same mind-blowing performance. That means max reads speeds of 3,000 MB/sec and writes of 1,600 MB/sec (sequential 128k). Read and write (random 4k) are listed at 743,000 IOPS and 160,000 IOPS. The mean time before failure (MTBF) is rated at 2 million hours and the all drives come with a 5-year warranty.

“With our new Ultrastar SN100 Series, HGST is helping today’s data center professionals meet one of their most important and difficult storage challenges: deliver extremely high application performance in a cost-effective manner,” said HGST Flash Platforms Group SVP Mike Gustafson. “By standardizing the deployment process with NVMe, IT organizations can now realize unprecedented gains in terms of application performance, server consolidation, and simplified setup and management in Linux, Windows and virtualized environments. This milestone is important as it allows customers to easily implement high-capacity PCIe SSDs at scale in a variety of data center environments.”

The Ultrastar SN150 is available in capacities of 3.2TB and 1.6TB, while the Ultrastar SN100 series adds in a lower capacity 800GB offering. The Ultrastar SN150 is shipping now, while the Ultrastar SN100 will ship next month. As for pricing, if you have to ask…