Seagate takes solid state drives head on

Seagate has unveiled its first solid state drive product line, featuring a range of SSD drives for the consumer and enterprise market, along with a PCIe card in tow.

The Seagate 600 series is aimed at consumers and ODMs. It will come in a range of capacities up to 480GB and a range of multiple z-heights, including 5mm. Usually 2.5-inch SSDs measure 7mm at the waistline, making Seagate’s 600 the thinnest 2.5-inch SSD to date. It incorporates a SATA 6Gbps interface, so it shouldn’t be a slouch, either. 

The 600 Pro is an entry-level enterprise SATA drive designed for cloud system builders, datacenters, cloud service providers, content providers, virtualised environments and other high performance niches. Seagate stopped short of disclosing the full specs – there is still no word on read/write speeds, although the company promises to deliver the highest IOPS/watt, as the 600 Pro consumers on just 2.8W of power.

The Seagate 1200 is a different beast altogether. It is a 12Gbps SAS drive for enterprise storage and servers, which the company claims will deliver the “ultimate in speed, consistent performance and highest levels of data integrity”. The drive is also backwards compatible with 6Gbps SAS environments, and will ship in capacities of up to 800GB, in 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch form factors.

Last, but not least, Seagate rolled out a PCIe memory card, dubbed the Seagate X8 Accelerator. The name sounds pretty mean, but luckily the marketing department wasn’t writing cheques the drive can’t cash. It delivers up to 1.1 million IOPS and it is twice as fast as the closest competitor, according to Seagate. In fact, Seagate says it is closer to DRAM performance than storage. Its top capacity is 2.2TB and, although there is no word on pricing, we’re not that sure we’d like to hear a quote.