Seagate jumps into SSD market

[Dr Mordrid]

Link....

Seagate enters solid-state drive market

Seagate is making a belated but potentially market-changing entry into the solid-state drive market.

Solid-state drives are generally faster than hard-disk drives, particularly at retrieving data, and have won limited acceptance in the laptop market. Seagate, however, is targeting the more lucrative and potentially larger server market and will compete with likes of Intel, Micron Technology, Samsung, and STEC.

Seagate's first salvo in the market is the new Pulsar drive, which is designed for blade computers and general server applications and offers up to 200 gigabytes of capacity based on the industry-standard Serial ATA interface.

Though pricier than hard-disk drives, the key dollar metric for solid-state drives in the server market is IOPS, or input/output operations per second. The more IOPS a large bank, for example, gets from a server equipped with solid-state drives, the more cost-effective the technology can be compared with hard-disk drives.

"SSDs provide superior dollars per IOP as compared to traditional hard drives," said Rich Vignes, a senior product line manager at Seagate.

Pulsar drives achieve a peak performance of up to 30,000 read IOPS and 25,000 write IOPS, Seagate says, many times the performance of even the fastest hard disk drives. Seagate began shipping Pulsar units to select customers in September.

[UtwigMU]

Question is:
Who designed the chips and who fabs them? Is this made by Seagate or just rebadged.

[Jammrock]

Nothing official, but it seems like the chips are OEM and the controller is Seagate. They have been R&D'ing the design for a while. Just my guess though...

[Technoid]

So now they start making ssds instead of suing ssd makers

[Elie]

Wake me up when SSD prices per gig reaches .20cents or less with capacities of up to 1TB or more at speeds of up to SATA 2.0 or 3.0 read and write

[Kooldino]

So now they start making ssds instead of suing ssd makers

Say what?

[VJ]

Somehow, I would have expected memory manufacturers to enter the SSD market, rather than traditional drive manufacturers... it just seems a bigger technological step for drive manufacturers then for memory manufacturers...

[Nicram]

Wake me up when SSD prices per gig reaches .20cents or less with capacities of up to 1TB or more at speeds of up to SATA 2.0 or 3.0 read and write

U will sleep for another 10 years then

[Wulfman]

I´m still thinking about putting this sub-100$ kingston-intel 40gb ssd in as my primary, and a big 2.5" platter into the ultrabay of the laptop. would be nice. and I hardly use the dvd-drive anyway.

mfg
wulfman

[UtwigMU]

SSD is faster than traditional drive but not night and day faster. IMO not 300 Euros worth faster. Will probably go 160GB SSD sometime next year.

[Elie]

U will sleep for another 10 years then

You're probably right LOL

[Belwarrior]

hmm.. currently i'm working at seagate's platter media production plant (just a technician) and i'm being asked come for OT as demand is still going high, my friend who is a developement engineer over at the R&D facility had been working on hybrid and SSDs for sometime now, feels that its not a good time to get the first generation SSDs. Their firmware is not optimized right now.

So i'll wait till things are more settled. I was rather waiting for the hybrids but they seem to have delayed their developement. In any case, the mechanical hdds are still here to stay and the good news is they are moving towards low power and more silent drives

[MultimediaMan]

It won't take 10 years... closer to 3-5 years.

The performance difference and the power savings are quite large, particularly when you put them in a mobile PC.

I did a blind test with four pre-production 80GB Intel x25s and without exception, users I gave the SSD drives to called me at my desk afterward to ask what was so wrong with their old drives because they were running so slow.

For the record, I replaced the drives in two older (non AHCI SATA subsystem) laptops, as well as two newer GS45 chipset-equipped laptops, the perceived speed difference between the two chipsets wasn't all that much (though the measured differences were quite large, especially read speeds), but even 7200RPM laptop drives and a desktop hardware RAID1 array with 10000RPM SAS drives were absolutely blown away by the single SSD. The random read/ write times were orders of magnitude faster on the SSDs and the systems were noticably crisper.

When the test ended, just for giggles, I took two of the drives and dropped them into a RAID 0 array on an Intel 965 chipset (ICH9R):

--------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 2.2 (C) 2007-2008 hiyohiyo
      Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
--------------------------------------------------

   Sequential Read :  468.269 MB/s
  Sequential Write :  140.309 MB/s
 Random Read 512KB :  325.384 MB/s
Random Write 512KB :  131.700 MB/s
   Random Read 4KB :   21.922 MB/s
  Random Write 4KB :   63.232 MB/s

         Test Size : 100 MB
              Date : 2009/05/25 1:44:37

[Elie]

Hmmm the sequential read looks promising in a raid 0 array.

[Technoid]

Say what?

Seagate sued STEC