[Brian]

Seagate has announced several updates to their enterprise hard drive and SSD lines. The Pulsar.2 is an MLC NAND based SSD that offers capacities up to 800GB and the Pulsar XT.2 leverages SLC NAND to deliver Seagate's fastest drive speeds to date. On the hard drive front, the Savvio 15K.3 gets a capacity bump to 300GB while the Savvio 10K.5 goes up to 900GB, both in a 2.5" form factor. Seagate also updated the 3.5" Constellation ES.2, bumping it up to 3TB.

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[udaman]

Brian, on 15 March 2011 - 10:02 AM, said:

Seagate has announced several updates to their enterprise hard drive and SSD lines. The Pulsar.2 is an MLC NAND based SSD that offers capacities up to 800GB and the Pulsar XT.2 leverages SLC NAND to deliver Seagate's fastest drive speeds to date. On the hard drive front, the Savvio 15K.3 gets a capacity bump to 300GB while the Savvio 10K.5 goes up to 900GB, both in a 2.5" form factor. Seagate also updated the 3.5" Constellation ES.2, bumping it up to 3TB.

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Well, if they follow HDD 'tradition' we can expect retail shipping sometime before the end of the year on larger capacities ?

Cost?

Controller(s)?

When do you get to test them, test samples?

[[ETA]MrSpadge]

I suspect the Savvio 10K.5 uses 300 GB platters. Pretty impressive for 10k rpm and 2.5", considering we just arrived at 375 GB platters at 7.2k rpm.

MrS

[Brian]

udaman, on 15 March 2011 - 04:10 PM, said:

Well, if they follow HDD 'tradition' we can expect retail shipping sometime before the end of the year on larger capacities ?

Cost?

Controller(s)?

When do you get to test them, test samples?

Cost will depend on your commercial contracts, they don't quote an MSRP for enterprise drives.

Controllers...don't know, but I will endeavor to find out.

Review units, we'll probably get them but to be fair to Seagate, we're being negligent at keeping up with the enterprise drives, we have a bunch already that keep getting bumped for consumer drives. We best get motivated if we want to see the new gear

[h4lf]

Wow, how are they getting 15 *petabytes* out of their MLC drives? Compared to "enterprise MLC" like the Micron C400 which is rated at 72TB, this is 2 orders of magnitude better? Is this for real?

[Brian]

h4lf, on 15 March 2011 - 08:10 PM, said:

Wow, how are they getting 15 *petabytes* out of their MLC drives? Compared to "enterprise MLC" like the Micron C400 which is rated at 72TB, this is 2 orders of magnitude better? Is this for real?

There are a lot of variables but the big one is write amplification, which we just don't know on these drives and is rarely disclosed. Even the latest SandForce client drives show a WA of less than 1. What it really is and if it varies by SF drive is unknown. The enterprise controllers have worked hard on WA for just this reason, to be able to get more life out of MLC NAND. Real world remains to be seen, but yeah, those are some pretty aggressive numbers.

[Darking]

I generally am looking at Enterprise level ssd's.. and reviews are what i would call nonexistent on the interweb.

Im wondering, if there are NDAs or the manufactors simply dont see the same reason to send out enterprise hardware to review sites, given the general audience of said sites (nerds with no cash ;-) )

If SR gets an offer for review models of these pulsar units, i would be very interrested to see their performance characteristics. Especially since sequantial read/Write speeds are about as boring as watching grass grow.

This post has been edited by Darking: 16 March 2011 - 06:32 AM

[Brian]

We get few enterprise SSD review offers. The Viking Modulars were a few and we have the P300's in now, along with the LSI Warp Drive. Manufacturers generally don't make their enterprise SSDs available for review. Not exactly sure why, I think there are different reasons, but we'll keep asking!

[Spod]

Brian, on 16 March 2011 - 07:20 AM, said:

We get few enterprise SSD review offers. The Viking Modulars were a few and we have the P300's in now, along with the LSI Warp Drive. Manufacturers generally don't make their enterprise SSDs available for review. Not exactly sure why, I think there are different reasons, but we'll keep asking!

Shopping from HP, we're lucky to find out anything about the brands they use. I'm guessing that they'll eventually expand their SSD offerings beyond the 60 GB and 120 GB Samsung based SATA offerings going for about four times the price of the equivalent consumer drives. But it'll all be HP badged, and we might not even find out what controller's on there without buying one and taking it apart. Still, reading this, I'm expecting they'll offer 900 GB 10K and 300 GB 15K SFF drives sometime in the next few months.

Quote

The 15K.3 not only doubles capacity over the previous generation drives, but they also deliver up to 3% faster random read and up to 4% faster random write performance.

Here's hoping that the new SSDs offer a greater improvement over previous generation performance!

[Brian]

Spod, on 16 March 2011 - 08:05 AM, said:

Here's hoping that the new SSDs offer a greater improvement over previous generation performance!

Such a dreamer