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Seagate 600 Pro-Series 200 GB SSD Review: For The Enterprise
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1. Seagate's 600 Pro SSD: Enterprise On A Budget

As a result of extreme consolidation, there are basically two major players left in the magnetic hard disk industry: Western Digital and Seagate. Combined, they control 90% of the market, and shipped over 100 million drives in the last quarter alone. They dominate all aspects of conventional storage. But when it comes to SSDs, both companies are almost an afterthought. Compared to the competition, their solid-state offerings have been slow, expensive, and were quickly outdated.

Seagate, specifically, has released exactly two pure SSDs in the last three or so years. In late 2009, the company launched its Pulsar family. The refreshed Pulsar.2 surfaced in early 2011. And that was it. Both products were enterprise-class drives that commanded exorbitant premiums (~$9/GB for MLC NAND). Although the Pulsar.2's performance was acceptable when it debuted, by 2013 standards, its numbers are almost comical.

Fortunately, Seagate seems to recognize where it is and where it needs to go. Like most of solid-state-oriented companies we talk to, the company agrees that SSDs are the future of storage. Volumes are primed to explode over the next decade. Seagate also realizes that the SSD market is too varied for just a single product family. This isn't a revelation to Seagate. Remember, it sells no less than six different enterprise-focused line-ups based on magnetic storage, spanning a range of form factors and performance levels.

Today, Seagate is pulling the covers back from its next-gen SSDs. Each product targets a very different use case. First, the Seagate 600 SSD is a consumer-oriented offering that comes in capacities up to 480 GB, and we'll have a complete review of that going live tomorrow. It's unique in that it ships in both 7 and 5 mm z-height form factors, an industry first. Seagate's 1200 SSD is a dual-port 12 Gb/s SAS drive that offers excellent write endurance and up to 800 GB of storage. The X8 Accelerator is a PCI Express-based drive powered by Virident, which Seagate invested $40 million in earlier this year. Finally, we have the Seagate 600 Pro SSD, the drive on our test bench today.

The 600 Pro ships in six capacities: 100, 120, 200, 240, 400, and 480 GB. This is a fairly interesting set of configurations, since the 100, 200, and 400 GB models are simply factory-over-provisioned versions of the 120, 240, and 480 GB offerings. And as you can see in the table below, the over-provisioning changes two key specs. Random 4 KB writes nearly triple, while write endurance increases between 3-9x. You could conceivably achieve the same thing by over-provisioning the larger drives manually, but Seagate believes there is value in doing this at the factory. Pricing should be the same, regardless of whether Seagate over-provisions the drive for you or not.

Speaking of pricing, expect to pay between ~$1.20-1.35/GB, depending on quantities, for the non-over-provisioned drives (120, 240, and 480 GB). For the over-provisioned models (100, 200, and 400 GB), pricing should fall around ~$1.40-1.60/GB.

Seagate 600 Pro SSD
User Capacity
100 (120) GB
200 (240) GB
400 (480) GB
Interface
2.5"  6 Gb/s SATA
Sequential Read
520 MB/s
Sequential Write
300 MB/s450 MB/s
4K Random Read
80,000 IOPS85,000 IOPS
4K Random Write
20,000 (8 000) IOPS30,000 (11,000) IOPS
Power Consumption(Active)2.8 W
Power Consumption (Idle)
1.05 W1.25 W
Write Endurance
220 (24) TB520 (134) TB
1,080 (350) TB


Based on specifications alone, it's hard to tell how these drives are going to perform. Sequential performance and 4 KB random reads appear outstanding. Four-kilobyte random writes and write endurance look great on the over-provisioned versions. In that regard, the 600 Pro is much like other drives in the same space. If you want better write endurance and random write performance, expect to pay dearly for them.

We're looking at Seagate's 200 GB 600 Pro, specifically. What makes this drive enterprise-oriented, and how do its read-focused specifications stack up against the competition?

2. Inside Seagate's 600 Pro SSD

When we received Seagate's 600 Pro, we noticed something unique: unlike other vendors that use four screws to hold the PCB and chassis together, this drive employs clips bent into the sheet metal to connect the top plate. 

As you can see, you'll almost certainly damage the back plate if you try to remove it. That plate is constructed using much thicker aluminum than what we're used to seeing, but it's probably necessary to keep the back plate attached. The area where the clips attach to the top is filled with blue foam, which we can only assume is for vibration dampening in big server enclosures.

Seagate makes it a point to talk about its build-once use-many philosophy. This means we expect to see the 600 Pro's internals used as a foundation for other products, including the consumer-oriented Seagate 600 SSD.

Front and center, we find the LM87800AA from Link_A_Media, which is actually now known as SK hynix memory solutions. This is the same controller Corsair uses in its Neutron and Neutron GTX drives. Even though SK hynix memory solutions can technically deliver the same sort of solution as SandForce, Seagate claims it was heavily involved in the firmware development. A thermal pad sits between the controller hardware and enclosure to help dissipate the device's heat.

Two Micron DRAM packages sit next to the controller, each hosting 128 MB of cache for a total of 256 MB. The 400 and 480 GB drives come with 512 MB of cache. Just below the DRAM are four surface-mount capacitors that allow the 600 Pro to flush its write cache to NAND in the event of a power failure.

The 600 Pro's eight NAND packages correspond to the SK hynix memory solutions controller's eight memory channels. Seagate is using Toshiba's Toggle-mode NAND manufactured at 19 nm. Given 64 Gb density, each of the eight packages contains four die, totaling 256 GB of raw flash.

All of the drive's components are on the top; there's nothing to see around on the back.

Although Seagate went light on specifics, the 600 Pro does provide ECC and other data path protections that help the drive recover from bit failures. One thing we found interesting, and perhaps a carry-over from Seagate's experience in the magnetic disk space, is the publication of Annualized Failure Rate (AFR). The company rates its 600 Pro with an AFR of 0.58%, which roughly equals a 1.5 million-hour MTBF. That might sound impressive, but Seagate's Savvio 15K.3 has an AFR of 0.44% and a two million-hour MTBF. 

3. Test Setup, Benchmarks, And Methodology
Test Hardware
ProcessorIntel Core i7-3960X (Sandy Bridge-E), 32 nm, 3.3 GHz, LGA 2011, 15 MB Shared L3, Turbo Boost Enabled
Motherboard
Intel DX79SI, X79 Express
Memory
G.Skill Ripjaws Z-Series (4 x 4 GB) DDR3-1600 @ DDR3-1600, 1.5 V
System Drive
Intel SSD 320 160 GB SATA 3Gb/s
Tested Drives
Seagate 600 Pro SSD, 200 GB
Graphics
AMD FirePro V4800 1 GB
Power Supply
OCZ ModXStream Pro 700 W
System Software and Drivers
Operating SystemWindows 7 x64 Ultimate
DirectXDirectX 11
DriverGraphics: ATI 8.883
Benchmark Suite
Iometer v1.1.0
4 Workers, 4 KB Random: LBA=Full, Span Varying Queue Depths
ATTO
v2.4.7, 2 GB, QD=4
Custom
C++, 8 MB Sequential, QD=4
Enterprise Testing: Iometer Workloads
Read
Write
512 Bytes
1 KB
2 KB
4 KB
8 KB
16 KB
32 KB
64 KB
128 KB
512 KB
Database
67%
100%
n/a
n/a
n/a
n/a
100%
n/a
n/a
n/a
n/a
n/a
File Server
80%
100%
10%
5%
5%
60%
2%
4%
4%
10%
n/a
n/a
Web Server
100%
100%
22%
15%
8%
23%
15%
2%
6%
7%
1%
1%


The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), a working group made up of SSD, flash, and controller vendors, has a testing procedure that attempts to control as many of the variables inherent to SSDs as possible. SNIA’s Solid State Storage Performance Test Specification (SSS PTS) is a great resource for enterprise SSD testing. The procedure does not define what tests should be run, but rather the way in which they are run. This workflow is broken down into four parts:

  1. Purge: Purging puts the drive at a known starting point. For SSDs, this normally means Secure Erase.
  2. Workload-Independent Preconditioning: A prescribed workload that is unrelated to the test workload.
  3. Workload-Based Preconditioning: The actual test workload (4 KB random, 128 KB sequential, and so on), which pushes the drive towards a steady state.
  4. Steady State: The point at which the drive’s performance is no longer changing for the variable being tracked.

These steps are critical when testing SSDs. It’s incredibly easy to not fully condition the drive and still observe out-of-box behavior, which may lead one to think that it’s steady-state. These steps are also important when going between random and sequential writes.

For all performance tests in this review, the SSS PTS was followed to ensure accurate and repeatable results.

All tests employ random data, when available. Seagate's 600 Pro SSD does not perform any data compression prior to writing, so there is no difference in performance-based data patterns.

4. Results: Write Endurance

We typically spend a lot of time evaluating write endurance when we review enterprise-class SSDs. Write endurance is one of the major differentiators separating enterprise and client-oriented drives, after all. As MLC-based storage continues pushing its way into spaces previously filled by SLC NAND, we have to keep a close eye on this difficult-to-benchmark, but still very important variable involved in evaluating solid-state storage.

The rise of read-focused enterprise drives is making this type of testing even more important, since you really want to know what writes will do to storage hardware stacked in favor of reads. Naturally, we have to appreciate the companies that treat write endurance as a first-class specification, and much of the credit for this should go to JEDEC for the JESD218A write endurance testing standard. Instead of issuing vague ratings, we now see most companies specifying their drives to the JESD218A standard, which uses the JESD219A enterprise workload to quantify endurance. This closely matches the types of workloads we use in our Enterprise Workload Performance tests, employing sequential write patterns and large block sizes. The result is minimal write amplification and wear leveling, yielding a better indication of actual P/E cycles for the NAND.

Endurance Rating
Sequential Workload, QD=1, 8 MB
Seagate 600 Pro
Micron P400mIntel SSD DC S3700
NAND Type
Toshiba 19 nm MLC
Micron 25 nm MLC Intel 25 nm HET-MLC
RAW NAND Capacity
256 GB
340 GB264 GB
IDEMA Capacity (User Accessible)
200 GB200 GB200 GB
Over-provisioning
28%70%32%
P/E Cycles Observed (IDEMA)
6,245
34,19536,343
P/E Cycles Observed (Raw)
4,879
20,11327,532
Host Writes per 1% of MWI
12.49 TB
68.39 TB72.69 TB
$/PB-Written
$228.18
$87.73$64.66


As we've seen time and time again, you get what you pay for when it comes to write endurance. Even though Seagate's 600 Pro is an enterprise drive, it is still a read-focused product. When you subject the 600 Pro to excessive writes, you basically throw away money. In fact, it took less than one day to consume 1% of its rated lifespan. If you used this SSD for 100% sequential writes, you could theoretically kill it in a little more than a month.

On the flip side, it's encouraging that we were able to get almost 5,000 P/E cycles out of 19 nm MLC NAND.

We actually had to tax this drive until 4% of its life was consumed in order to generate accurate data. It took nearly 25 TB of writes for the first percentage point to expire, which would have translated to an impressive 10,000 P/E cycles. We were understandingly skeptical of those results, so we kept writing until the values leveled off.

Even though this is the first SSD we've reviewed seemingly built for read-focused use, we expect that the 600 Pro's performance to mirror similar drives currently on other vendors' roadmaps. You should start seeing enterprise write endurance fall into three categories: the first involves read-focused MLC with ~5,000 P/E cycles; the second is best for mixed use, featuring eMLC with ~25,000-35,000 P/E cycles; the last is write-oriented SLC capable of 100,000+ P/E cycles.

5. Results: 4 KB Random Performance And Latency

Given that Seagate's 600 Pro is a read-focused SSD, it must be good in read performance. Offering up to 84,000 IOPS, the 600 Pro isn't merely adequate in this discipline. It does great. It separates itself from Intel's SSD DC S3700 and simply crushes Micron's P400m at high queue depths.

How does the 600 Pro hold up in write testing, though?

Perhaps a bit surprisingly, the 600 Pro holds its own against the Intel and Micron offerings. In general, it's slightly faster than the P400m and just behind the SSD DC S3700. Considering a significant price difference, Seagate shows it can compete against heavier-weight competitors.

Looking at average response time, the 600 Pro falls roughly where we expect it to. Our maximum response time measurement is a little more troubling. The 600 Pro's ceiling is more than two times higher than the SSD DC S3700 and quadruple the P400m.

As we know, average response time masks spikes, while the instantaneous maximum doesn't reflect the frequency of them. In order get a clearer picture, we need to dig into performance consistency. 

6. Results: Performance Consistency

Increasingly, we pay close attention to the performance consistency of enterprise-class SSDs. This is what separates a good drive from a great one when all of the corner case testing seems equal. Over the past year, we measured this in terms of large block transfers in our Enterprise Video Streaming section. Armed with this data and our exclusive analysis, the peaks, valleys, and frequency of each become clear. If you look at the information for long enough, you start to see fingerprints for each drive.

We started with large block transfers because, in enterprise video applications, if you don't buffer or write data fast enough, you can lose it completely. Random 4 KB transfers are slightly more academic, but they also match database transfers more closely. With this sort of workload, you might not lose data, but the system will slow down.

For the following tests, we subjected Seagate's 600 Pro, along with Micron's P400m and Intel's SSD DC S3700, to 25 hours of continuous random 4 KB writes across each entire drive. We recorded the IOPS every second, giving us 90,000 data points. We then zoomed in to the last 60 minutes to more coherently visualize the results. 

As you can see, the P400m and SSD DC S3700 are stellar performers, which we already knew going in. The 600 Pro's results surprised us a little, though. We didn't necessarily expect Seagate's new SSD to match the higher-priced competition. However, the amount of variance it demonstrates is quite high. 

More positively, the 600 Pro posted at least 40,000 IOPS (0.8 ms or less response time) on 25% of its transfers. But, as the histogram also shows us, almost 10% of the drive's transfers took more than 3 ms (less than 11,000 IOPS). Some of the other SSD vendors limit raw I/O performance to maintain more consistency; this does not appear to the case here, though. If you watch Iometer as the test runs, its variability is apparent. The value of the last update jumps between 8,000 and 40,000+ IOPS. 

We did notice that if you limit your write area to 100 GB, manually over-provisioning, in essence, the variability disappears. This makes sense because, as the number of spare cells increases, the controller manages their use more effectively. This also tells us that the amount of spare capacity and the memory's performance is responsible for the ups and downs, rather than an issue with the controller architecture. Interestingly, Seagate rates its 240 GB 600 Pro 11,000 4 KB random write IOPS, which is almost exactly where that top distribution centers around. Unfortunately, since we only have the 200 GB version to test, we couldn't double-check those numbers.

Now, to put all of this information into perspective. If you're looking at worst-case scenarios, Intel's SSD DC S3700 is the way to go; even Micron's P400m gives you great consistency. At its worst, the 200 GB 600 Pro is a 10,000-IOPS drive. But at best, expect to see more than 40,000 IOPS. If your application writes in bursts, giving the 600 Pro time to recover, it is an excellent option. 

7. Results: Enterprise Workload Performance

Our next set of tests simulates different enterprise-oriented workloads, including database, file server, Web server, and workstation configurations.

The database workload (also categorized as transaction processing) involves purely random I/O. Its profile consists of 67% reads and 33% writes using 8 KB transfers.

The Seagate 600 Pro doesn't do particularly well compared to the SSD DC S3700 and P400m. It trails from the start and remains in third place across all queue depths.

The file server workload, which consists of 80% random reads of varying transfer sizes, reveals a much closer race. The 600 Pro fares well until we apply higher queue depths.

The Web server workload (100% read, varying transfer size) is especially friendly to the 600 Pro. Rated at 80,000+ read IOPS, Seagate's new 200 GB model quickly surpasses the SSD DC S3700 and P400m at high queue depths.

Once again, when we mix in even a small number of writes, as we do with the workstation benchmark (80% reads, 80% random), the 600 Pro falls behind. That's not to say Seagate's drive doesn't perform well. In fact, when you consider price, it actually does admirably. The SSD DC S3700 offers higher I/O performance/dollar in the Workstation and Database profiles, but by less than 10%. In the File server and Web server tests, the 600 Pro wins by a clear margin.

8. Results: Sequential Performance

When it comes to sequential read and write performance, the 600 Pro wins at 200 GB. It beats the SSD DC S3700 by 60 MB/s and the P400m by twice that.

Seagate extracts its maximum sequential performance at the 200 GB capacity point, whereas Intel requires that you buy the 400 GB version to match the 600 Pro. This is a pain for enterprise customers, since the larger (more expensive) models are often the only way to get peak numbers. What we're seeing here is Seagate allowing its customers to get great performance at more affordable capacity points.

9. Results: Enterprise Video Streaming Performance

Enterprise video streaming is a demanding workload within the enterprise space. Companies want more HD streams with higher bit-rates and no stuttering. A storage solution well-suited for enterprise-class video delivery has completely different capabilities than something designed for databases. At the end of the day, you're basically looking for exceptional large-block sequential write performance. You also need a high level of consistency that traditionally isn't seen from consumer SSDs. For a more in-depth analysis, take a look at page 10 of Intel SSD 910 Review: PCI Express-Based Enterprise Storage.

Once the drive is in a steady state, we write its entire capacity 100 times. We use 8 MB transfer sizes and a queue depth of four, recording timestamps for each individual write. The graph below reflects 100-point averaging, so that you can better visualize the results.

Seagate's 600 Pro is great for sequential streaming. Even during its worst-case run, it maintained good consistency. The nastiest dip we see the 600 Pro take is still within 10% of the P400m's average. Things don't go quite as well for the 600 Pro compared to Intel's SSD DC S3700, though. Even when we look at the 200 GB model of Intel's enterprise SSD, Seagate's dips and variance are more severe. And when we step up to the larger Intel drive, the lowest dips are still higher than the 600 Pro's average.

Threshold
Best-Case Buffer Size
Worst-Case Buffer Size
420 MB/s
8 MB
28 MB
425 MB/s8 MB77 MB
430 MB/s427 MB587 MB
435 MB/s3,256 MB3,413 MB


As you can see, the 600 Pro can easily maintain 420-425 MB/s. If you push it much higher, you need exponentially larger buffers to maintain the transfer speed.

Once again, even though the 600 Pro isn't the top performer in this round of testing, it gives you outstanding value. We are comparing Seagate's drive to SSDs that cost at least 50% more. Until we see enterprise-oriented competition that more closely matches the 600 Pro's target market and price point, however, we have no way of telling how good it really is. 

10. Can An Old-World Storage Vendor Compete In The SSD Space?

Slowly but surely, the enterprise-oriented SSD industry is changing. Gone are the days of SLC-based drives serving as the workhorses of the data center. Even high-endurance MLC is beginning to give way to more vanilla compute-quality MLC flash. Much of this is a direct consequence of what enterprise-class customers want. Over the past few years, they've eschewed pricier models, favoring desktop drives that can be swapped out quickly. These "disposable" SSDs are a known commodity. They're cheap and still perform admirably. Everyone knows they'll wear out faster, but that doesn't matter. All SSDs wear out and eventually need to be replaced; it's a fact of life. What folks have figured out, though, is that it's more cost-effective to replace ordinary desktop drives at a higher rate than spending big bucks on robust SSDs.

This is why, over the course of 2013, you will start seeing more SSD vendors segment their enterprise families into swim lanes, each addressing a specific use case. In the case of the 600 Pro, you're looking at a product built specifically for read-intensive workloads. You just have to be careful with it. Writes chip away at its rated lifespan quickly. We plan to review a number of SSDs that fit the same description over the next few months, though. No doubt, vendors will take slightly different approaches to this, and it will be exciting to see where the industry goes (at least as exciting as enterprise storage gets).

Seagate's 600 Pro doesn't offer the best raw performance out there. But it is quite capable, and we do see it lead the pack in several categories. It just can't do what an Intel SSD DC S3700 can do. Then again, the 600 Pro only really struggles in the workloads it's not meant for anyway. Keep this thing out of write-intensive environments and it'll treat you well.

When we talked to Seagate about the 600 Pro, we knew that pricing would make or break it. If the company planned to sell above $2/GB, there'd be no way we'd want it. Surely, thousands would have still sold. But it would have played second fiddle to some of the more impressive enterprise SSDs already on the market. However, at ~$1.50/GB, Seagate has a winner on its hands.

Let's put that into perspective. Seagate's Savvio 146 GB 15K.3 SAS drive sells for almost $1.70/GB. Of course, the Savvio has a lower failure rate and nearly unlimited write endurance. But it's still astounding how far the prices on solid-state storage are falling.

The 600 Pro (and the rest of Seagate's new solid-state drives) show the storage world that this company is serious about augmenting its conventional storage line-up. It isn't going to let its enterprise drive business dwindle as SSDs become more prevalent. Seagate is still at a disadvantage, though. This is the company's first complete solid-state product portfolio. It has strategic business relationships with a number of key players, but it doesn't have its own controllers and it doesn't manufacture NAND. We can only hope that Seagate uses its clout in storage to continue developing compelling SSDs and create a more competitive landscape, to all of our benefits.