Solid
State Drives provide extremely fast access times while
drawing much less power than conventional magnetic hard disk drives.
Not only does this save money on electricity, but on cooling and
space needed as well. While short-stroked 15k RPM HDDs are still
commonly used in datacenters, there are being rapidly supplanted by
SSDs despite their relatively high costs. The performance from
several SSDs allows for the replacement of several racks of HDDs,
even relatively small numbers are used in a tiered storage solution.
“The enterprise SSD market is now primed and well-positioned for
growth from both a revenue and unit perspective, with Gartner
estimating unit growth to double and sales to reach $1 billion for
calendar year 2010,” said Joseph Unsworth, Research Director at
Gartner. “Superior enterprise SSDs provide transformational
capabilities when optimized in storage and server
environments.”
Seagate
is the world's largest manufacturer
of hard drives, and it has been working on several SSD projects
even as Intel, OCZ
Technology, and Western
Digital have entered the enterprise SSD market. The best
performance available still comes from PCI Express solutions due to
the current limits of SATA, but there is still a healthy and growing
market for 2.5 inch solutions.
The company is announcing its first entry into the SSD market, and
it has a very interesting feature set. Pulsar series SSDs feature
Power Loss Protection through the integration of a supercapacitor
inside the drive. Pulsar’s data architecture is designed for
integrity and protection, enabling customers to use Pulsar with
the write cache enabled for maximum performance without worry. The
company won't say who makes the controller or flash, but Seagate has
undoubtedly leveraged its years of experience into optimizing the
firmware.
“Seagate is optimistic about the enterprise SSD opportunity and
views the product category as enabling expansion of the overall
storage market for both SSDs and HDDs,” said Dave Mosley, Seagate's
Executive Vice President for Sales, Marketing, and Product Line
Management.
Pulsar will be available in 50GB, 100GB, and 200GB capacities and
within a 7mm, 2.5-inch form factor. It uses Single-Level Cell NAND
flash and connects through a 3Gbps SATA interface. It achieves a peak
performance of up to 30,000 read IOPS and 25,000 write IOPS, with
240MB/s sequential read and 200 MB/s sequential write.
The
company is predicting an annualized failure rate of 0.44%. A
five-year warranty is standard.
Seagate began shipping Pulsar units to select OEMs for revenue
sales in September 2009. These drives are targeted solely at the
enterprise market with a focus on blade servers, and will not be
generally available to the public, although a few units may hit the
grey market. Consumer SSDs are expected from Seagate in the future,
although the company is being tight with details.
“Our strategy is to provide our customers with the exact storage
device they need for any application, regardless of the component
technology used. We are delivering on that strategy with the Pulsar
drive, and you can expect additional products in the future from
Seagate using a variety of solid state and rotating media
components,” Mosley added.
