Seagate today unveiled a production-ready unit of the fastest single solid-state drive (SSD) demonstrated to date, with throughput performance of 10 gigabytes per second (GB/s). The early unit meets Open Compute Project (OCP) specifications, meaning it can be used in hyperscale data centers.

The 10GB/s unit, which is expected to be released this summer, is more than 4GB/s faster than the previous fastest-industry SSD on the market. It also meets the OCP storage specifications being driven by Facebook.

The technology would work with any system that supports the Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) protocol, which was developed by Seagate and other consortium vendors to replace the legacy Serial AT Attachment (SATA) standards and eliminate informational bottlenecks. The NVMe specification defined an optimized register interface, command set and feature set for SSDs using the PCIe interface -- a high-speed serial computer expansion bus standard used in both enterprise and client systems.

The unit could be used in an all-flash array or as an accelerated flash tier with hard-disk drives (HDDs) for a more cost-effective hybrid storage alternative.

In addition to the 10GB/s SSD technology, which accommodates 16-lane PCIe slots, Seagate is finalizing a second unit for eight-lane PCIe slots, which still performs at a throughput of 6.7GB/s, and is the fastest in the eight-lane card category.

Segate has made both the 16 and eight-lane SSD units available to its customers. The devices are are expected for product launch in summer 2016.