SANTA ANA, Calif., August 7, 2007 – STEC (Nasdaq:STEC), today announced the MACH8™ product family of Solid State Drives (SSDs). Ideal as reliable, drop-in replacements for hard disk drives (HDDs), MACH8 SSDs are designed to deliver industry-leading performance and security for Enterprise storage applications at a competitive cost. MACH8 has two product variations – a version optimized for high random read and write IOPS (MACH8-IOPS), and a base version (MACH8), making the product optimal for multiple applications in the Enterprise.
“STEC places significant emphasis on the Enterprise OEM market and solving the storage performance challenges therein. We designed the MACH8 family in response to customers’ clear desire for Enterprise-class SSD for use in general purpose servers and within large external storage arrays,” said Patrick Wilkison, vice president of marketing and business development at STEC.
The introduction of STEC’s MACH8 reflects the emerging distinctions of product grades and performance levels among SSDs. “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 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.”
MACH8 SSDs offer major improvements to data access times – the biggest limitation of traditional hard disk drives. While hard drive access times are measured in milliseconds, access times for MACH8 SSDs are in microseconds; enabling a significant increase in server processor utilization and overall system performance. The MACH8 family supports both SATA-II and PATA, with SATA native to the core controller. The product line supports both MLC and SLC NAND, configurable to meet customer needs.
High Reliability for Demanding Applications
Data stored on the MACH8 SSD is secured by proprietary full data path protection. An industry first, STEC’s Full Data Path Protection provides high levels of data protection and data integrity – a feature not available on industry standard SATA and PATA HDDs nor with client-grade SSDs.
MACH8 also boasts a projected mean time between failures of 2.8 million, the MACH8 is twice as reliable as current best-in-class hard drives.
High Performance in the Most Important Dimensions
The MACH8 is designed to exceed customer expectations by achieving over 100MB/sec sustained sequential read and write speed. The workloads of Enterprise applications place immense strain on drives to deliver very good random performance for both reads and writes. The drives can deliver up to 10,000 random read IOPS in the MACH8-IOPS version, and 5,000 random read IOPS in the base version. While most SSDs have historically struggled to deliver meaningful random write speeds, the MACH8 SSD delivers 800 random write IOPS – a significant improvement over the highest performance Enterprise-class HDD. The MACH8-IOPS SSD achieves 10X the performance of the existing enterprise HDDs when used in server applications.
The MACH8 product family also offers meaningful performance improvements for non-enterprise applications such as notebook PCs and other mobile applications, where the performance of other SSDs or HDDs is not sufficient to meet system-level performance demands. This issue is particularly challenging when using MLC-based NAND due to its slow performance.
The MACH8 product line delivers an extensive set of relevant product features to meet the full set of Enterprise demands:
• STEC proprietary controller ASIC managing 8 independent channels of Flash
• Full Data Path Protection
• Supporting both SATAII and PATA
• NCQ – Native Command Queuing
• Over 100Mbytes/sec sustained sequential transfer rate
• Random I/O performance of 10,000 random read IOPS and 800 random write IOPS
• Total Drive Protection with AES-128 encryption in hardware
• SMART command support
• 2.5-inch, 1.8-inch and 3.5-inch form factors
• 1,500 Gs operating shock
• 16.6 Gs operating random vibration
• Full industrial temperature range (-40ºC to +85ºC)
• Full data purge support
• Five-year standard warranty for MACH8-IOPS version and three-year standard
warranty for MACH8 base version
Pricing and Availability
The MACH8 family of products is expected to ship to OEM customers during Q407 in capacities of 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, and 256 GBs. OEM pricing is available upon request. Sales information is available at www.stec-inc.com, via email at [email protected] or by calling (949) 476-1180.
About STEC
STEC, Inc. is a global leader of SSD and memory solutions that empower a wide range of applications. STEC’s precision design engineering and manufacturing have met the needs of the OEM market for 18 years. For more information, visit the company’s web site at www.stec-inc.com.
Safe Harbor Statement
This release may contain forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties, including, but not limited to, statements concerning the performance of MACH8 products, potential customers sampling MACH8 products and their level of interest, our ability to address the growing enterprise-class drive market, expected NAND Flash price declines, and anticipated price spread between HDDs and SSDs. Actual results may differ materially from the results predicted. Important factors which could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements are detailed under “Risk Factors” in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission made from time to time by STEC, including its Annual Report on Form 10-K, its quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, and its current reports on Form 8-K. Other factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements include the following risks: MACH8 products may not perform in the manner anticipated, customer demand for such products may not grow as projected and new technological advancements in the field might produce more competitive products. STEC undertakes no obligation to release publicly any revisions to any forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances occurring after the date hereof or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events.
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