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Conclusion
It's nice to see Seagate back in the flash business, even under these circumstances. Internal changes we've tracked within Seagate lead us to believe more flash-based products will come in the future. Seagate is so far behind the flash curve that we wonder if it will ever recover.
I frowned on the company's first attempt to bring a consumer SSD to market. Seagate's 600 had the exact hardware configuration that Corsair had released eleven months earlier in the Neutron GTX. The 600 wasn't a remarkable success even though it delivered decent performance for the time. The three-year warranty, early adoption of 19nm flash, and the high price kept enthusiasts from selecting the drive over the SandForce products that flooded the market. Seagate now owns the remains of SandForce, but it has yet to release the 3000 series.
The Seagate Nytro 141 has issues that the company will need to address. The reboot issue isn't that rare. Other companies had similar issues in the past and fixed the problem with a simple firmware update. The problem stems from Seagate owning the Nytro 141 after its release to the channel. This could really hurt Seagate in the long run because the bug likely impacts several types of laptops. The Nytro 141 didn't have the same issue on our desktop systems.
Computer Upgrade King lists the 256GB for $89, which is a very low price for an SSD with a DRAM buffer. Similar SSDs cost a bit more, but the Nytro 141 sells for DRAMless SSD prices. Products like this tend to go viral. We've seen it with several Samsung gray market SSDs that outperformed products with similar pricing. There are not enough Nytro 141 drives available for that to happen this time, but we expect this drive to sell out quickly.
Seagate released a "best-fit" list of use cases for the Nytro 141 in the cost-competitive full capacity configuration. The list includes workstation and personal computers. After our testing, we would like to make a more specific list. The drive isn't an excellent performer under heavy workloads and the low sequential write speed compared to SSDs with newer 3D memory technology will not be attractive to gamers that store more than 50GB. The Nytro 141 fits best in a light use computer system used to play more mainstream games, surfing the web, checking email and other office tasks. It's a general use SSD for typical applications and activities. The Nytro 141 is boring on the surface, but those mundane tasks represent the typical user's workload. If the Nytro 141 had a higher price we would steer shoppers back to the 850 EVO, but the Nytro undercuts the EVO by enough to make it a viable option for cost-conscious shoppers.
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