“Designed with affordability and server applications in mind, the Toshiba RM5 vSAS series seeks to provide a cost effective and much higher performing solution to overcome the bottlenecks that are inherent with SATA today,” Comments Paul Rowan, General Manager for the SSD unit at Toshiba Memory Europe.
Where SATA drives often use SAS expanders to scale out, the RM5 enables the use of native SAS from end-to-end, eliminating the need for protocol translation to SATA. Customers can now take full advantage of SAS’s richer feature set and realise performance throughput superiority over SATA.
Featuring Toshiba Memory Corporation’s BiCS FLASH TLC (3-bit-per-cell) 3D flash memory, the RM5 series will initially be available in capacities up to 7.68TB[2] with a single 12Gbit/s port, SFF-8639 connector and in a 2.5-inch form factor. Sample shipments to OEM customers started in limited quantities, and Toshiba will gradually increase shipments from the third calendar quarter of 2018.