Seagate, the biggest maker of hard disks, recently launched a new range of solid state disk drives, as it aims to align itself better with current buying trends.
In particular, the company’s new 600 SSD is aimed at laptop users who want to speed their boot and data access times. This is Seagate’s first foray into this market segment.
Claiming a 4x boot time improvement, Seagate said that SSD-stored data is safer if the laptop is dropped. From my own experience over the last five years of using using SSDs in laptops, I can confirm both this, and that their lower power consumption helps to improve battery life too.
The 600 SSD is available with up to 480GB and in multiple heights including 5mm, which the company says makes it “ideal 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’s compatible with the latest 6Gbps SATA interface.
The other new SSD systems are aimed at enterprises. The most interesting of these is the X8 Accelerator, which is the result of Seagate’s investment in Virident, a direct competitor with Fusion-io, probably the best-known maker of directly-attached SSDs for servers. The Seagate product is also a PCIe card with a claimed IOPS of up to 1.1 million. The X8 offers up to 2.2TB in a half-height, half-length card.
Of the two other new drives, the 2.5-inch 480GB 600 Pro SSD and the 1200 Pro SSD, the first is targeted at cloud system builders, data centres, cloud service providers, content delivery networks, and virtualised environments, and is claimed to consume less power and so need less cooling. It consumes 2.8W, variable according to workload, which Seagate reckons is “the industry’s highest IOPS/watt”.
Up the performance scale is the 800GB 1200 Pro SSD, which is aimed at those needing high throughput. It attaches using dual-port 12Gbps SAS connectors and “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.”
Seagate said it buys its raw flash memory from Samsung and Toshiba but holds patents for its controller and system management technologies.