Friday 10th October 2008

High-speed Seagate SSDs coming next year

Posted at: 4:38pm 10th October 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

Hard drive maker making the shift to solid state in 2009, starting with enterprise drives

After announcing plans for its first SSDs last year, Seagate has revealed that it’s going to start producing SSDs next year. The hard drive maker plans to start-off with enterprise-level drives, which it says will be aimed at enterprise customers looking for high speed .

Speaking to Custom PC, Seagate’s corporate communications director, Ian O’Leary, explained that the drives would be primarily aimed at guys who are ‘IOPS [input/output operations per second]-hungry’. ‘Cost is a secondary consideration for them,’ said O’Leary, adding that ‘they already buy our 15K drives, for example, and they do something to them called short stroking – in other words they only have the head flying around the outside part of the platter, just to get extra speed, so they’re only using a part of the capacity of the drive to do that.’

O’Leary doesn’t see SSDs taking over completely from hard disks for a long time, either. ‘We’re talking about tier-zero in storage, which is kind of sitting on top of everything else,’ said O’Leary, ‘but underneath that there’s transactional storage and secondary storage and so on; that’s still going to be disk drive territory, as the cost per gigabyte equation makes much more sense.’

Seagate isn’t going to produce the NAND chips inside the drives itself, and will instead buy them in from a third party. However, O’Leary says that the NAND chips themselves are only a part of the equation. ‘You need to combine them together with the interfaces, error checking and all of the features that our enterprise clients have expected from our enterprise-class drives for the last 29 years,’ explained O’Leary.

He added that ‘these guys might not be particularly cost sensitive, and IOPS may be their biggest thing, but I’ll tell you what they’re really sensitive to, and that’s system failure. They’re going to want to be sure that the product that they buy to replace tried and trusted drives which have been working fine for a number of decades is going to work.’

So when does Seagate have plans to bring out consumer-level SSDs? According to O’Leary this is currently ‘further along the road’ than the enterprise drives, and says that ‘we haven’t got a timeframe for it - it’s something that we’re going to get into as and when it’s appropriate.’

Are SSDs more appropriate for top-tier enterprise applications than desktop PCs, or should Seagate be getting into consumer SSDs now? Let us know your thoughts.

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Comments

poor sony erricson

its a shame how sony erricsons can only use the m2's, so theres no point me reading this as it dont affect me. but im sure its interestng lol.

Comment by Trikadoc at 5:38pm 16th October 2008

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@ Cool_CR

If you read that full Anandtech article you'll find there's a serious issue with Samsung NAND and J-micron controllers. If Seagate are just packaging these in their own brand box, then there could be an issue. I know Seagate make good hard drives, but then they make them themselves so they can control the quality. That's something they can't do with SSD's.

Comment by l3v1ck at 8:48pm 12th October 2008

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Get moving Seagate!

If Seagate wants to be a market leader in the SSD markets, like they are in the HDD markets, then they better get moving. Ian is right on target when it comes to the importance of reliability. This key element alone will separate the 70 or so "me too" SSD companies from the market leaders, especially in the enterprise. So stop wasting time Seagate and get moving! You're slipping farther and farther behind, and when you do start shipping please develop and launch your SSD products with technology similar to this... http://www.fusionio.com/PDFs/Whitepaper_Solidstatestorage2.pdf

Comment by Pounce_Original at 4:47pm 12th October 2008

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Get moving Seagate!

Comment by Pounce_Original at 4:47pm 12th October 2008

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@l3v1ck

Seagate are a trusted brand in the industry (have gone of the boil just slightly this year) but always put out solid good quality products with good performance and reliability so i dont think they will take just any old crap they will surely use intel or samsung chips. (and if not there is always the custom pc review that will worn us is there bad.)

Comment by Cool_CR at 1:17am 12th October 2008

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Cool, is it another SSD one then?

Comment by l3v1ck at 10:27pm 11th October 2008

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@l3v1ck

You'll be interested in next month's labs test then ;)

Comment by combatus at 2:55pm 11th October 2008

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That link again on two lines so you can see it: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets /intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3403

Comment by l3v1ck at 7:25pm 10th October 2008

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The problem with 3rd party chips.

Anyone who has read this: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3403 review of 3rd party SSD's will be left wondering how good they really are. If the components (ie NAND and controller) are made by someone else, how do you know that you're getting a good product if it's just been re-badged? If and when I buy an SSD, it's most likely to be an Intel one

Comment by l3v1ck at 7:19pm 10th October 2008

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