Seagate, a company that has been known in the circles of storage companies for decades has launched what appears to be a new chapter in the company’s history. Seagate is launching a fully comprehensive hard drive and solid state drive enterprise line up for customers. In the past, Seagate only made their SSDs available to a select few OEMs in order to create more focus on their SSD development. Currently, Seagate only plans to continue SSD development in the enterprise space. This time, though, the second generation Seagate SSDs named Pulsar.2 and Pulsar XT.2 will be available to all OEMs and will be a much broader offering.
Seagate Pulsar SSDsThe first part of Seagate’s launch is their highest performing one, their SSDs. Their SSD offerings will consist of the
Pulsar.2 and the
Pulsar XT.2. The difference between these two is primarily the fact that the Pulsar.2 is a new drive that is their first
MLC based SSD. The Pulsar.2 is specifically designed for the enterprise with the ability to automatically detected and correct any data errors that may result during normal drive operation. These drives are intended to fill the most demanding data applications where speed is the most important thing. Some applications include online transaction processing, cloud computing, content delivery and even possibly high frequency trading.
As many people know, many MLC drives have issues with performance degradation over time, as a result Seagate has perfected their drives by creating a tailored solution with their own controllers and Samsung NAND flash. The relationship that Seagate and Samsung have created has enabled Seagate’s Pulsar drives to be capable of sustained performance for the entire life of the drives.
These drives also have Auto-Lock and Instant Secure Erase which allow for the utmost highest level of security. These drives are secured via the
AES-256 bit encryption key which makes the drives extremely secure if they were to ever be stolen. The Auto-Lock feature locks the drive’s data if the drive is suddenly removed or stolen and makes the data unreadable to anyone unauthorized to access the drive.
The Pulsar.2 will come in capacities ranging from 100GB upto 800GB and will come in 6Gb/s SAS as well as SATA 6G. These drives will also be capable of 10 full drive writes per day, which is more than the majority would expect to use on a single drive, let alone on a multi-drive array. These drives also have power loss data protection in the event of a power outage and are supported by a 3 year warranty. This is all possible due to the fact that Seagate uses enterprise class MLC rather than consumer grade MLC found in other MLC SSDs. But because it is MLC, these drives should cost about 30-40% less than their SLC companion but also mean less longevity.
The Pulsar XT.2 will come in small capacities ranging from 100GB to 400GB and will only be available in the 6Gb/s SAS interface. Furthermore, these drives also utilize SLC NAND which results in high performance. The XT.2 is capable of random reads/writes of 48K and 22K respectively while obtaining sustained reads and writes of 360 and 300 MB/s. On top of being faster, the Pulsar XT.2 is also capable of more longevity than the Pulsar.2 with over 35 full drive writes per day which is more than anyone would ever use in almost any usage scenario since that effectively means 3.5TB per day of writes per drive. In total, the Pulsar XT.2 is capable of having 25 Petabytes or 25,000TB written to it for the life of the drive. These drives claim to have a 2 Million MTBF(mean time between failures) which results in a Seagate maximum 5 year warranty on these drives. The one thing that Seagate stressed heavily was that all of these performance figures are sustainable over the lives of their drives rather than for the first few weeks, months, or years.
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