Icy News: Hitachi Ultrastar SSD400M Enterprise SSD Review

The Ultrastar SSD400M is Hitachi's effort to provide a serious contender in the burgeoning eMLC enterprise SSD space. The SSD400M offers all the pedigree that enterprise buyers could want, including not just Hitachi's longstanding leadership in the storage industry, but Intel's as well. The SSD400M leverages Intel's highest quality 25nm eMLC NAND and SSD processor technology, combined with Hitachi/Intel jointly engineered firmware. The resulting SSD400M carries Hitachi's brand name but is the result of a strong co-development effort. 

Hitachi offers the 2.5" Ultrastar SSD400M with a 6.0Gb/s SAS interface and delivers throughput of up to 495 MB/s read, 385 MB/s write, 56,000 random 4K read IOPS and 24,000 random 4K write IOPS. In the enterprise though, it's not just about speed with SSDs, there's a larger total cost of ownership measurement at play too. Hitachi quotes 8,360 IOPS/watt, for those factoring in power consumption in their storage buying decision. 

The SSD400M isn't just about performance though, Hitachi's engineering and qualification leads to an SSD that supremely reliable, with just a .44% annualized failure rate (2 million hour MTBF). From an endurance perspective the drive offers writes up to 7.3PB (400GB capacity), equivalent to 4TB of writers per day for five years, and unlimited reads. Other highlights include the T10 Data Integrity Field (DIF) standard, extended error correction code (ECC), Exclusive-OR (XOR) parity to protect against flash die failure, parity-checked internal data paths without an external write cache, and a power loss data management feature that does not require super-capacitors.

Hitachi offers the SSD400M in 200GB and 400GB capacities with optional TCG self-encryption and are backed by a five year warranty...full review to storagereview.com