First SSD From Seagate

All the storage industry is waiting since many months to know what will be the first SSD of the leader of the hard disk drive industry, Seagate Technology. Here it is.

seagate_pulsar

Name: Pulsar. Form factor: 2.5-inch with 7mm height. Three models with the following capacities: 50GB (ST950011FS), 100GB (ST9100011FS) and 200GB (ST9200011FS). Flash chips: SLC. Interface: 3Gb SATA. Maximum sequential transfer rate: 240MB/s for read and 200MB/s for write. Peak performance of up to 30,000 read and 25,000 write IO/s

Comments

It's good but not really exciting. Just few days ago Micron Technology announces its RealSSD C300 SSD in the same form factor with up to 256GB, 6Gb SATA and read/write up to 355/215MB/s.

The most interesting spec of the long-awaited Pulsar is its remarkable write speed - close to the read speed - resulting of excellent algorithms to manage the SSD. Seagate launches it as an enterprise unit, for blades and servers - not for PCs or notebooks -, with 0.44% annual failure rate (AFR) for high reliability and endurance and 5-year warranty. Some OEMs got it since September 2009 for evaluation which means availability during the next semester.

What else: nothing. Seagate refuses to reveal where do the chips and the controller come from, if it works with partners for the design, where the unit will be manufactured, the price, and the name of its OEMs.

For sure, Seagate has the best knowledge of the OEM market for enterprise HDDs where the company is by far the number one in the world. But, for sure, the OEMs will look at all other numerous offerings coming from company dedicated to SSDs. And today, Pulsar has good specs, but not the best ones compared to the competition. It's surprising that, for its new enterprise drive, Seagate chooses SATA rather than SAS and FC where Stec will maintain its success and comfortable leadership.

Now all the HDD makers have their own SSDs but one, Hitachi GST (we exclude small player ExcelStor). WD is in the embedded market only with SATA 1.8- and 2.5-inch devices. Samsung and Toshiba do more than that as they manufacture flash chips, the key elements of an SSD. All of them say that HDDs and SSDs are complementary products but what we think is that, each time you sell an SSD, you don't sell an HDD. More than that, for certain applications, an SSD can replace several HDDs. Most of these companies are not going to reveal revolutionary SSDs that could kill their main activity and core business.

Furthermore, Seagate and WD are vertically integrated as they produce most of the components of their hard disk drives. It's not the case for their SSDs resulting in lower margin (in percentage), and, more than that, in a market where they have much more competitors.

It's not the first step of Seagate into flash. Many years ago, the company was a shareholder of SanDisk. In 2007, it introduces an hybrid HDD integrating a rotating disk drive and flash memory as a cache: a disaster.