Seagate Looks To Enterprise With Speedy Pulsar SSDs

Chris Preimesberger,

Seagate claims that its new enterprise-class Pulsar solid state drives (SSDs) are the fastest yet

Seagate has begun shipping its new 2.5-inch Pulsar solid-state drives (SSDs), which it claims is the fastest it has ever made.

Seagate said that the 400GB Pulsar XT.2 uses SLC (single-level cell) flash with a native 6Gb/s SAS (serial-attached SCSI) interface. The XT.2 is optimised for mixed workloads typical of enterprise environments, such as OLTP (online transaction processing), database or web indexing, and email.

A more capacious version, the 800GB Pulsar.2, is scheduled to become available 29 July. Seagate claimed that this is the first MLC (multi-level cell) flash-enabled SSD made available by an enterprise hard-drive producer.

Data Centre SSDs

In a single storage device configuration, the XT.2  produced an SPC-1C result of 20,008.82 SPC-1 IOPS with an average response time of 2.05 milliseconds over a 10-minute duration, compared with an SPC-1C Sustainability Test result of 20,011.07 IOPS with an average response time of 2.08 milliseconds over four hours.

SPC (Storage Performance Council, an independent storage research firm) benchmark results on testing of the Pulsar can be found here.

The Pulsar.2 is aimed specifically for data centres, unlike typical MLC solid-state drives built for consumer applications. The Pulsar.2 holds up to 800GB and has built-in intelligence, in that it is able to automatically detect and correct data errors that could plague normal drive operations, Seagate said.

The Pulsar.2 SSD supports both native 6G bps SAS and Serial ATA (SATA) 6G bps interfaces for primary and secondary server storage.

Enterprise Needs

“Most SSD suppliers aren’t fully aware of the needs of the enterprise,” said Jim Handy of Objective Analysis. “It isn’t just a fast interface like SAS, Fibre Channel or PCIe that they need, and it isn’t just IOPS levels in the tens to hundreds of thousands.

“Without data integrity and reliability, an SSD is worthless to most enterprise users. Seagate’s undeniable leadership in the enterprise HDD market has given the company a deep understanding of the necessity of data integrity and endurance.”