Seagate Updates Entire SSD Portfolio
6Gb SATA up to 480GB, 12Gb SAS up to 800GB, in PCIe with Virident
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on May 7, 2013 at 3:05 pmSeagate Technology plc announced its new portfolio of flash-memory solutions.
The company took the wraps off its first client SSD and its
next-generation enterprise SSDs. Featuring the Seagate 600 SSD, Seagate
600 Pro SSD, and the Seagate 1200 SSD, the new line of drives are
engineered to deliver fast speed and high data integrity. Rounding out
the portfolio, Seagate also announced the new Seagate X8 Accelerator, a
storage class memory PCIe card powered by Virident Systems,
Inc. enabling the company to offer all key
interfaces including SATA and SAS solutions.
1200 SSD
"We are pleased to announce these new flash memory products. With
these new drives, Seagate solidifies its commitment to the flash-based
storage market by delivering enterprise SSDs and server-side solutions
as well as client solutions," said Gary Gentry, senior VP and GM of Seagate’s SSD business. "By
adding more SSDs to our family of HDD and solid state hybrid drives, we
now have the broadest portfolio of storage products in the industry,
delivering one-stop shopping for our customers and partners. And we’re
just getting started. Seagate is committed to becoming a premier
supplier of both solid state drives and storage class memory products.
We have put in place a winning strategy for developing multiple high
value, flash based products and solutions for our customers."
600 SSD: Faster Performance with 6Gb SATA
A laptop upgrade, the 600 SSD delivers faster boot up speeds, shorter
application load times, and improved system responsiveness for the
ultimate performance. Laptop users can boot up nearly four times faster
and load applications more than two times faster than with a standard
HDD, greatly reducing the amount of wait time to access content.
"SSDs continue to be among the most popular product categories on
Newegg.com as more consumers increasingly turn to them to deliver more
speed, faster boot up times and superior performance," said Patrick Chung, VP of global product management at Newegg, Inc. "Seagate’s
new line of SSDs, including the new 600 SSD, will be a great addition
to our existing assortment. We’re excited to introduce the new SSDs to
our customers and look forward to continuing our strategic partnership
with Seagate."
"Over the years, Seagate has been a valued partner contributing a
vast array of storage solutions to our comprehensive selection of IT
products," says Lionel Garcia, VP at Tiger Direct, Inc. "Seagate’s
products are in high demand among our customers and we’re excited to
add their new SSD to our assortment. As consumer demand for greater
speed and shorter boot up times continues to rise, the new 600 SSD will
provide customers with the ultimate performance they crave."
Fast to install as a HDD drive upgrade, the 600 SSD is available in multiple z-heights including an industry-first, diminutive 5mm-high drive making it for most ultra-thin devices as well as standard laptop systems. The drive features up to 480GB of capacity and comes in a 2.5 form factor. It also incorporates a 6Gb SATA interface for fast data transfer rates.
600 Pro SSD – Fast Performance, Low Power with 6Gb SATA
A low power server and storage solution, the 600 Pro SSD is for cloud
system builders, hyperscale datacenters, cloud service providers,
content delivery networks, and virtualized environments. An entry-level
enterprise SATA SSD, the 600 Pro SSD combines performance and lower
power delivering best-in-class performance efficiency and IO/s/watt
value.
"By incorporating Seagate’s SSD technology into our product offerings
we are able to address customer demand for greater speed, short,
consistent response times, and greater enclosure and power efficiencies," said Paul Poynter, CTO, Rorke Data, an Avnet business unit. "As
we continue to drive PC innovation in today’s markets, we look forward
to integrating this enterprise SSD technology into our Rorke product
line providing our discerning customers with the ultimate in performance
and value."
Engineered with efficiency in mind, the 600 Pro SSD features high
IO/s/watt to improve system performance while reducing power and cooling
costs for transaction-hungry datacenters and cloud enterprise
applications. Utilizing 2.8 watts typical operating power, the
drive reduces energy by automatically adjusting the power consumption to
workload I/O levels – using less power for lighter workloads. The drive
is also equipped with the intelligence to deliver data integrity,
safeguarding against unexpected power loss and undetected corruption
when a device is powered off.
The 600 Pro SSD is available with up to 480GB capacity and comes in 2.5-inch form factor. It is equipped with a 6Gb SATA interface for fast data transfer rates.
1200 SSD – Fast Speed, Performance with 12Gb SAS
Designed for demanding enterprise storage and server applications with
complex, write-intensive mixed workloads, such as high-performance
computing and data analytics, the 1200 SSD delivers speed, consistent
performance and data integrity.
Built to deliver fast data access, the drive uses algorithms that
optimize performance for frequently accessed data by prioritizing which
storage operations, reads or writes, occur first and optimizing where it
is stored. The result is improved performance to help close the gap
between processor and data access.
It incorporates a dual port 12Gb SAS connector providing 100%
faster interface speed, over previous generations, for twice the I/O
bandwidth while ensuring reliability, availability and scalability. The
drive is also backwards compatible with 6Gb SAS environments.
The 1200 SSD leverages Seagate’s existing enterprise expertise and
manufacturing excellence to deliver data integrity, manageability,
testing and support. It also safeguards data against unexpected power
loss and protects data from undetected, unintentional corruption.
The 1200 SSD is available with up to 800GB capacity and comes in either a 1.8-inch or 2.5 inch form factor.
X8 Accelerator – Application Performance Turbocharged
The X8 Accelerator, powered by Virident, delivers memory-class
performance and storage-class capacity with enterprise reliability and
data integrity in a single, low profile PCIe card. Providing up to 1.1 million IO/s,
it boosts server performance with fast speed that is up to 2X faster
than the closest competitor and closer to DRAM performance than storage.
Up to 2.2TB in a small footprint (HHHL, half height half
length), the X8 Accelerator fits in any server. The card’s x8 PCIe Gen-2
interface enables it to deliver maximum application performance in
database and virtualization applications such as SQL Server, Oracle
Enterprise Server, MySQL, and VMware.
Comments
At the same time Seagate renews its entire portfolio of SSDs, from the lower to the higher end, proving the company believes firmly in these flash devices even if it continues to insist that they are not in competition with HDDs but complement them. The best example proving it's not true is for notebooks, where manufacturers are more and more replacing HDDs by SSDs.
The firm entered this field in 2009 with Pulsar line, comprising 6Gb SATA or SAS 2.5-inch devices. They were updated two years after, and then it took two more years to refresh the products (a long time in this fast evolving technology) as they are today.
First note that Seagate has - definitively? - stopped to use more reliable but more expansive SLC NAND on its entire new line, including enterprise units. That's a general trend in the industry as there are now several ways to ameliorate the durability of MLC chips.
That's the first time the HDD maker is putting a foot in 'client' version (for notebooks and ultrabooks with a 5mm version of the 600 SSD). It is also pioneering 12Gb SAS - not yet available for HDDs - with its own controller. And it just decided to enter into PCIe SSDs having great future.
The company has long experience of SATA, SAS and FC (stopped for HDDs and SSDs) interfaces, but no one on PCIe. That's why it invested $40 million in Virident and now just resells the products of the start-up.
Last year Seagate also put some money in Israeli start-up DensBits, designer of eMMC controller supporting TLC and MLC flash devices.
The new 1.8-inch SAS solid-state disk is an original unit. We just found OCZ and sTec with this king of tiny enterprise SSDs. Furthermore the 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch SAS devices are offered in two configurations, one for mixed workload, the other one for high endurance, also current trend in the industry. The integrators will have to choose or to mix the two different SSDs depending on the applications, a difficult job that was not necessary for HDD.
Seagate is using 24nm NAND MLC chips from Toshiba for all its new SSDs - before moving rapidly to 19nm -, but the PCIe one, probably based on MLC hips from Intel because the semiconductor manufacturer is an investor of Virident. It's amazing to see the storage giant integrating Toshiba's chips as it is very proud about its a strategic agreement with Samsung on flash technology, signed at the same time it acquired Samsung HDD business.
Seagate never was big actor in SSDs. Now the question is to know if it will become more powerful with its new updated line. Some products are innovative but for some others, you can already find better specs, especially in term of capacity.
For the worldwide market, the company gave to the press some relatively conservative figures on SSDs, estimating that there will be by 2020 one billion HDD and 200 million SSDs.
Main specs of new Seagate's HDDs
Model |
600 SD |
600 Pro SSD | 1200 SSD |
X8 Accelerator |
Capacity (GB) | 120 to 480 |
100 to 480 |
200 to 800 |
555 to 2,222 |
NAND chips |
Toshiba MLC |
|
Toshiba MLC |
Intel (?) MLC |
Form factor | 2.5" | 2.5" | 1.8 & 2.5" |
HHHL PCIe |
Height | 5 & 7mm | 7mm | 7mm | |
Interface | 6Gb SATA |
6Gb SATA | 12Gb SAS |
PCIe 2.0 |
Read bandwidth max. (MB/s) |
550 | 520 | 750 | 2,700 |
Write bandwidth max. (MB/s) |
450 | 450 | 500 | 1,100 |
TBW* | 36.5 to 72 |
220 to 1,080 |
3,650 to 14,600 |
10,000 to 33,000 |
Price | €479 (480GB) |
€579 (480GB) |
NA | NA |
Price/GB | €1.00 | €1.21 | NA | NA |
* Total Bytes Written (TB)