Seagate Shipping Pulsar XT.2 Solid State Drive

News
By Kevin Parrish
published

Seagate has begun shipments of its enterprise-class Pulsar XT.2, slated as the company's fastest SSD.

Monday Seagate said that it shipped its fastest SSD thus far, the enterprise-class Pulsar XT.2, which combines single-level cell (SLC) flash with a native SCSI 6 Gb/s (SAS) interface. The company's other Pulsar enterprise-geared SSD, the Pulsar.2, will feature multi-level cell NAND flash when it hits retail shelves next week on July 29.

According to Seagate, the 2.5-inch Pulsar XT.2 is geared for complex, mixed workloads typical of enterprise environments such as online transaction processing (OLTP), database or web indexing, and email. However the upcoming 2.5-inch Pulsar.2 SSD, which supports both native 6 Gb/s SAS and Serial ATA (SATA) 6 Gb/s interfaces, was designed specifically for data centers. It automatically detects and corrects any number of data errors that could otherwise plague normal drive operations, delivering "the price/performance, data integrity, and endurance needed for performance-hungry enterprise applications," the company said.

"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."

The Pulsar XT.2 now arrives in 100 GB, 200 GB and 400 GB capacities. It's hotpluggable, offers a Self-Encrypting Drive (SED) tech for the 400 GB model, a sustained data transfer rate of 360 MB/s and an I/O data transfer rate of 600 MB/s. Next week the Pulsar.2 will come in 100 GB, 200 GB, 400 GB and 800 GB capacities and will offer SED tech only on the 800 GB model.

"The Pulsar.2 drive is the first MLC-enabled SSD from an enterprise storage company to deliver the price-performance benefits with the data integrity and drive endurance needed for demanding enterprise environments," the company said.

Seagate did not provide pricing for the Pulsar XT.2 and the Pulsar.2, so stay tuned.

Kevin Parrish
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10 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Randomacts
    Why can't they just compete for better $/g ratio...

    imo most people don't need this speed anyways.
    Reply
  • danwat1234
    I heard from storagereview that the Pulsar MLC drive can handle 15 Petabytes of writing over it's lifetime and the SLC drive can handle 25 Petabytes! Sounds too good to be true.
    Reply
  • Kaiser_25
    price is going to be lulz
    Reply
  • alidan
    you know, ssds kick hdds asses, collectively.

    however i will buy a hdd over a ssd because i need 1tb of storage, minimum, and thats 70ish$, a 30gb ssd, 70ish$ even as a boot thats pathetic, because how much more can i store on it besides os, and how often do i boot my pc? once every week, once a month? barring crashes, or power outs about 2-3 weeks at any give time. i can handle a minute boot time on the os.

    however my sotorage on the other hand, it can take a minute to load some folders, and going through the folders for what i want takes io ops.

    i can use a ssd for storage more than i can for boot.

    but for storage alone, i need minimum of 120gb, and a nice "future proof" of 240gb. but thats WAY to expensive for me.

    why not stop speeding this crap up and bring the prices down. seriously. i would take a drive that is half the speed of a hdd but with no seek time if it was .25$ a gb.
    Reply
  • ralfthedog
    RandomactsWhy can't they just compete for better $/g ratio... imo most people don't need this speed anyways.
    People who don't need speed are better off with spinning disks. The high end of the market needs both speed and reliability. That is why they are the high end of the market.

    The cool thing is, eventually the high end of the market will trickle down to the consumer grade stuff. We are not that many years away from low end systems having RAID 5 of 2TB SSD drives.
    Reply
  • alidan
    ralfthedogPeople who don't need speed are better off with spinning disks. The high end of the market needs both speed and reliability. That is why they are the high end of the market. The cool thing is, eventually the high end of the market will trickle down to the consumer grade stuff. We are not that many years away from low end systems having RAID 5 of 2TB SSD drives.
    yea not many years off. we are more like a few decades form that.

    but right now, lets say non server use. will an end user see a difference in ssd speed?

    i mean the biggest speed boost is the effectively no seek time. even if the drives were 50mb read write, they would still seam like they vastly out preform hdds, because of the seek time.

    i really cant give a s*** about any sata speed boosts, because they dont matter in ssds right now. and real professional drives, they have there own options for massive speeds.
    Reply
  • eddieroolz
    Right, Seagate entered the SSD market.

    Let's hope these will have a reputation for actually lasting.
    Reply
  • ethanolson
    RandomactsWhy can't they just compete for better $/g ratio... imo most people don't need this speed anyways.
    The SAS interface opens up a whole new world. This is absolutely fantastic news! Integrating capacity drives with performance drives allows a datacenter manager to tier their storage on the same storage device, reducing the complexity of their SAN. This is very good news.
    Reply
  • I think most of the posters here don't realize that Seagate is targeting the Enterprise/corporate world with these. These are meant for servers... and expense is worth it if it's faster and more reliable than all else out there.

    I would buy a set of these if it means if my database queries are faster because of it...
    Reply
  • gregzeng
    Seems little use of NTFS-COMPRESSED, except myself? MS claims negligible speed loss for about double the storage. Why no mentions anywhere of NTFS-compressed? I use it on all my hard drives nearly everywhere.
    Reply