STEC Woos Enterprises With Speedy SSDs

By Greg McNevin

August 10, 2007: The world of solid state drives (SSDs) is heating up by the day now, with STEC becoming the latest company to announce a new line of products aimed specifically at enterprise storage applications.

The company claims that its MACH8 is the first SSD family to be optimised specifically for enterprise servers and storage arrays, and come with not only improved data access times and data path protection, but increased performance compared to other SSDs and different levels of performance depending on application.

Developed as direct drop-in replacements for traditional HDDs, the MACH8 comes in two flavours, the base version and the high random read and write optimised MACH-IOPS. The company claims the both versions can attain 100MB/sec sustained sequential read and write speeds and up to 10,000 and 5,000 random read IOPS in the MACH8-IOPS and base versions respectively.

STEC also claims that while most SSDs have in the past struggled to deliver meaningful random write speeds, its SSD delivers 800 random write IOPS - 10X the performance of existing enterprise HDDs when used in server applications.

If anything shows the increasingly popularity of SSDs, it’s the mere fact that STEC feels two different levels of performance is now needed in the SSD arena.

“The product differentiation within the market for SSDs is beginning to resemble that of the hard drive market, wherein the Zeus-IOPS family of products services the extremely high performance and online needs of the Enterprise, and the MACH8 family serves the next level of online needs of the Enterprise,” said Wilkison. “The market demand for this technology provides clear validation that STEC is introducing a new and vital tier of Enterprise-class SSD which will forever serve the need for the improved performance and reliability not attainable with HDDs.”

The drives boast a projected mean time between failures of 2.8 million, twice as reliable as current best-in-class hard drives according to STEC. They support both SATA-II and PATA, and come in capacities of 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, and 256 GBs.

OEM versions of the MACH8 are expected to ship during the last quarter of this year.

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