Thought the 6Gb/s limit was fast enough? Well, nope. Most SSDs can hit 500MB/sec without a problem, so a jump was needed. Enter Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST) which is now a Western Digital company, where they've proudly announced the storage industry's first technology demonstration of a 12 gigabit per second (12Gb/s) SAS SSD.

Yes, 12Gb/s is what I said. SAS SSDs and hard disk drives have a strong bond with SCSI, and continue to be the building blocks of choice for enterprise and cloud-based storage. 12Gb/s SAS takes this one step further by being a broadly supported industry standard that is capable of delivering twice the throughput compared to today's 6Gb/s SAS solutions, all whilst maintaining established, known enterprise protocols and attributes.

One of the features, and limitations, of today's SAS drives is a second interface port that provides additional bandwidth to the drive. With 12Gb/s on each of these ports, a drive could send and receive data at 12Gb/s which would give a total available interface bandwidth of an insane 4.8GB/s per drive. With this speed, you can just imagine what enterprise and cloud datacenters could do, reducing latency, and more.

We should see more info on these drives over time, and I'm sure our storage editor Chris will get his paws on one ASAP. I think he blew a fuse when he received this info.