Seagate Technology today announced its new portfolio of solid-state drives (SSDs) -- including its first consumer model for laptops -- and a new PCIe flash card.
The new 2.5-in drive series includes the consumer-class Seagate 600 SSD, the 600 Pro SSD, the 1200 SSD, and the new X8 Accelerator, a PCIe flash memory card from Seagate's partnership with Virident Technology. The new PCIe card offers all the key storage interfaces including SATA and SAS.
"By adding more SSDs to our family of hard disk 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," said Gary Gentry, general manager of Seagate's SSD business. "And we're just getting started. Seagate is committed to becoming a premier supplier of both [SSD] and storage-class memory products."
Seagate calls its 600 SSD "the ultimate laptop upgrade," delivering nearly four times faster boot speeds over standard hard disk drives, shorter application load times and improved system responsiveness. The drive has the latest 6Gbps SATA interface.
The Seagate SSD 600.
"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, vice president of global product management at Newegg. "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."
The Seagate 600 SSD is available in multiple 7mm or 5mm-high form factors, meaning they fit into most ultra-thin notebooks as well as standard laptops.
The drive comes in 120GB, 240GB and 480GB capacities.
Seagate's specification sheet claims the 600 SSD has a sequential data read/write rate of up to 500MB/sec using 128KB block sizes. And it can generate up to 80,000 random I/Os per second (IOPS) read/write rate using 4KB block sizes.
Seagate 600 Pro SSD
Seagate's new 600 Pro SSD is a low-power server and storage drive aimed at 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 flash performance and lower power for "IOPS/watt value."
The 600 Pro SSD typically uses 2.8 watts of operating power, and reduces energy use by automatically adjusting the power consumption to workload I/O levels, Seagate said in a statement.
The Seagate 600 Pro SSD is available in capacities ranging from 120GB to 480GB. It also has a 6Gb/s SATA interface and a top sequential read/write rate of 520MB/sec.
Seagate 1200 SSD
Seagate's new 1200 series SSD is also an enterprise-class drive, but is aimed at enterprise storage and server applications with complex, write-intensive mixed workloads, such as high-performance computing and data analytics.
The 1200 SSD delivers Seagate's top performance in an SSD and the highest levels of data integrity, the company said.
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," Seagate said.
For resiliency, the 1200 SSD incorporates a dual-port 12Gbps SAS connector. It has twice the I/O bandwidth compared to its 6Gbps predecessor. As with all 12Gbps SAS products, the drive is backwards compatible with 6Gb/s SAS environments.
The 1200 SSD is available in 200GB, 500GB and 800GB capacities and comes in either a 1.8-inch or 2.5 inch form factor.
The drive has a top sequential data transfer rate of 750MB/sec and can generate up to 110,000 read IOPS and 40,000 write IOPS.
Seagate X8 Accelerator
The Seagate X8 Accelerator, which uses a Virident controller chip, is a server-based PCIe flash card. It comes in a single, low-profile card that can generate up to 1.1 million IOPS in order to boost application performance. Seagate claims the X8 Accelerator's performance is closer to volatile DRAM than non-volatile NAND flash.
The X8 comes in capacities that range from 500GB to 2.2TB in a half height, half length form factor.
Because of its small size, the X8 Accelerator fits in any server. The card comes with an 8-lane PCI Express Gen-2 interface, and is designed to boost the performance in database and virtualization applications such as Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Enterprise Server, MySQL and VMware.
This article, Seagate's first consumer SSD gets blazing fast 12Gbps SAS connectivity, was originally published at Computerworld.com.
Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed. His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com.
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