STEC recently added a number of solid-state disk (SSD) drives to its product lineup, including the DRAM-based ZeusRAM and a new member in its MACH family that supports multi-level cell (MLC) or single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash.

Unlike general-purpose storage devices, the ZeusRAM SSD is designed for workloads such as metadata logging, journaling and database indexing in systems such as NAS appliances and unified storage systems.

STEC claims sustained performance of up to 130,000 read I/Os per second (IOPS) and 88,000 write IOPS on the 8GB ZeusRAM, but company officials note that capacity and IOPS performance are not the key parameters for applications such as metadata logging.

“The focus in metadata applications is on low latency and response times,” says Swapna Yasarapu, a product line manager at STEC. The company claims latency of less than 23 microseconds on the ZeusRAM SSD. That compares to about 100 microseconds for SLC NAND SSDs and 400 microseconds for MLC NAND.

The 3.5-inch ZeusRAM SSDs come with dual-port 6Gbps SAS interfaces and a five-year warranty. In addition to the DRAM capacity, the ZeusRAM includes flash-based backup for data protection in the event of a host power loss.

STEC introduced the ZeusRAM SSD, which is targeted at OEMs, at the Oracle Open World conference today.

Separately, STEC last week introduced the MACH16 SSD, a 2.5-inch SATA-based device that can be configured with either MLC or SLC NAND flash.

The company claims performance of up to 30,000 read IOPS on both the SLC and MLC versions, and write IOPS of 10,000 on the SLC configuration and 6,000 IOPS on the MLC version. Capacity ranges up to 400GB on the MLC version and 200GB on the SLC configuration.

STEC did not provide pricing for the MACH16 SSD drives, which are targeted at OEMs.

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