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INSIDE THE HGST ULTRASTAR SSD800MM
The SSD800MM is housed in a 15mm, 2.5″ aluminum housing. There are a total of 8 screws holding it all together; 4 holding the top cover and 4 holding the main board to the back assembly.
After taking off the top cover you notice a conductive pad between the NAND and the housing. Removing the main board exposes conductive pads on the other side of the housing.
The controller is a joint venture between Intel and HGST and has 12 channels. Next to the controller are two DDR3 DRAM packages from Micron that total 1GB.
Each side of the board has 9 enterprise 25nm MLC NAND packages, for a total of 18. Each package contains 32GB of NAND for a total of 576GB in our 400GB version. Large amounts of over-provisioning is common on enterprise SSDs, but at 44%, HGST is on the high side.
Finally, instead of a large bank of surface-mount capacitors, HGST followed Intel’s S3500/S3700 lead with a single through-hole capacitor.
I’ve long been a proponent of running virtualization environments totally under SSDs. This 12G technology should be the convincer. Would have liked to see some RAID 0 benchmarks run with 4 and 8 SSD units. Curious as to how linear the performance gains would be.
This will come in time and obtaining multiple drives for this report was not possible. We always ask as was obvious with our recent Intel and Adaptec/SMART report where we used 24 Optimus SSDs.
Other sites already did 12 gb/s weeks ago! Did you guys miss that?
Oh really? Perhaps you can send us a link or two to a 12Gbps review (not announcement). Thanks ahead.
These are the first that we are aware of.
Tweaktown and storage review have both already done 12Gbs with the true first 12gbs ssd… the toshiba! This isn’t even the first 12gbs ssd.
You are absolutely correct and thanks. Paul snuck one in there while we were on our way to Computex. Thanks for the heads up!
Three weeks ago….