The new members of HGST's Ultrastar family comprise one high endurance 800GB model and a pair of 1.6TB drives, one for normal use and the other for 'read mostly' applications.

The Ultrastar 12Gbps SAS SSDs come in three versions, offering different combinations of write endurance, write performance, and cost.

The MH.B variants are rated at 25 full random writes per day for five years, the MM drives offer 10 per day, and the MR suffix denotes drives intended to read-intensive purposes.

Security options include instant secure erase, self-encryption, and FIPS 140-2 certified self-encryption.

"HGST leads the industry in SAS SSDs, which continue to be the preferred storage building blocks for a large variety of server and storage systems that support a growing set of data-intensive enterprise applications," said HGST vice president of SSD product marketing Ulrich Hansen.

"As our OEM, cloud and enterprise customers implement solutions to meet a variety of storage needs, SSDs and HDDs will increasingly be deployed in tiered pools of storage based on respective TCO strengths."

The new drives are currently being qualified for use by various vendors, and are available immediately.