Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and Intel are collaborating to develop enterprise-class, solid-state hard drives, featuring SAS and Fibre Channel interfaces aimed at the enterprise data center market. While Hitachi brings to the joint development its system-level expertise and support of large OEMs, Intel brings its flash memory expertise.

As a result of this alliance, SSD drives will finally start to live up to their potential, instead of being treated like hard drives.

Brendan Collins, vice president of marketing at Hitachi GST, said the drives, which are expected to be available for OEM qualifications during the first quarter of 2010, will be branded with the Hitachi name, and will be sold and supported by Hitachi.

The entry of Hitachi into the SSD business marks the first formal effort by a major playing in platter-based disk storage into flash memory storage. Up to now, it has been flash memory makers like Samsung, SanDisk and Micron, and their forte is memory, not storage.

The planned capacities for the SSDs will be 73GB, 147GB and 300GB, the same storage size as the ultra-fast 15,000 RPM drives used in RAID 5 systems. They will come in 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch drive form factors, which will be able to fit nicely in a blade or rack mounted server.

Vendors can stick with software they have written for the Hitachi controllers by using the Hitachi controller chips, server OEM and software. That will make it easy for a server using hard disk drives to migrate to SSDs in the future.