"We are essentially finished with the development work. We're validating the product [and] we're doing pre-qualificaiton work with some of our OEM customers," he said. The first of the products from those OEMs are likely to hit the market before the end of this year, according to Hansen.

As planned, the products will use 6G bit-per-second (bps) SAS and 4G bps Fibre Channel interfaces. The first SSDs from the partners will use SLC (single-level cell) flash, the form that has been used in most enterprise SSDs so far. SLC packs less data into the same amount of space and is more expensive per gigabyte, but it also has greater longevity for uses where data is intensively written to the drive, Hansen said. Ultimately, it is less expensive for these applications, he said. By the second half of next year, Hitachi and Intel expect to come out with versions that use MLC (multilevel cell), which is more dense, less expensive and adequate for applications where data is written less intensively, he said.

Consistent with Amini's forecast last year, the drives will have an MTBF (mean time between failures) of as much as 2 million hours, Hansen said.