CES 2011, Las Vegas - The enterprise SSD market is really heating up. Just yesterday we showed a Toshiba enterprise SSD that will ship with a claimed 515MB/s read speed. If 515MB/s doesn't impress you then maybe this will, 535MB/s! Hitachi and Intel have teamed up to take on SandForce and Toshiba in the enterprise market, no surprise there, the announcement went out back in November.

The Hitachi / Intel drive was on display here in Las Vegas and we were able to snap a few pics. Most of us don't get all that excited about enterprise drives but what is exciting is how close Intel's enterprise drives are to their consumer product line. Intel has been fairly quite about their upcoming consumer SSD but the new Hitachi Ultrastar SSD400S gives us a glimpse of what to expect.

The Hitachi Ultrastart SSD400S is currently in validation with several OEM partners, just like the Toshiba and SandForce 2K Series. The Hitachi model we saw today comes with a SAS interface running at 6Gbit/s.

With an eagle eye I spotted the 'i' on the new Hitachi SSD and started putting the pieces together. Hopefully Intel gets their consumer model ready by March so we can have a three way battle in the consumer marketplace. SandForce, Marvell and Intel battling it out in a SATA 6G arena will make for an exciting season of SSD battles.