DapuStor has split its J5060 enterprise SSD into dense storage and a permanent fast-write region, sacrificing capacity to tackle QLC’s sluggish random writes.
According to Tom’s Hardware, the new firmware runs selected quad-level cell flash in pseudo-SLC mode. Instead of treating that space as a temporary cache, the drive exposes the fast and dense regions as separate block devices, letting storage software decide what goes where.
On a 30.72TB model, the arrangement turns about 4TB of QLC capacity into 800GB of pSLC. Other configurations reserve 400GB or 1.2TB, costing between six and 20 per cent of the drive’s QLC capacity. DapuStor says no separate SLC chips are needed, which should please anyone whose storage budget has already had a difficult conversation with the purchasing department.
The company claims the fast region delivers more than seven times the random-write performance of QLC and average 4K random-write latency below eight microseconds. It says the pSLC area withstands more than 25 times as many program and erase cycles as the QLC region, although it has not supplied separate endurance ratings for the two.
This makes it useful for database journals, write-ahead logs and metadata caches that generate frequent small writes, while the rest of the drive can hold larger quantities of less demanding data. The standard 30.72TB J5060 is rated at 30,000 random-write IOPS with 16KB operations and 35-microsecond write latency.
The J5060 comes in a U.2 form factor, uses PCIe 4.0 x4 and spans capacities from 15.36TB to 122.88TB. Its overall endurance rating is 0.5 drive writes per day for five years. DapuStor says firmware changes handle die-level isolation, SLC reserve allocation and scheduling between the two regions.
The underlying idea has appeared in the NVMe specification for years. DapuStor’s bet is that operators will want one configurable SSD instead of separate fast and high-capacity drives. Pricing, a general availability date, and a named customer are still missing, along with independent performance results and details on whether the split can be changed while the drive is running.
