Seagate has thrown its gauntlet into the SSD fray with Pulsar, but only for the enterprise market, for now.

CORP TALK: The corps are talking, and hard drive manufacturer Seagate is finally throwing its gauntlet into the Solid State Drive (SSD) fray.

Called the Pulsar, the SSD is part of Seagate’s enterprise family, offering up to 200GB capacity in a 2.5-inch SATA-interfacing form factor.

It’s also based on single-level cell (SLC) flash memory technology, where one bit of data occupies a single cell of flash memory for optimum performance (as opposed to multi-level cell, MLC, where four bits of data occupies one cell). With SLC, the drive is marked with a low 0.44% AFR (annualized failure rate) rating and comes with a 5-year limited warranty.

Performance peaks at up to 30,000 read IOPS (input/output ops per second) and 25,000 write IOPS, and the Pulsar gives 240MB/s sequential read and 200 MB/s sequential write speeds on paper.  The Pulsar was shipped to select OEM customers in September 2009. For more information, check here.

Navin Danapal, Editor, HWM Malaysia

Navin (HWM Malaysia): Seagate may be the latest to join the foray of the SSD market, as the shift from hard drives move to flash drives, but aside from the high cost of SSD versus HDD, there is also another issue that hasn’t been solved by SSD makers which is only apparent upon usage.

This is the rapid deterioration of SSD performance which is highly noticeable over the course of time.

This drop in performance can quickly make a speeding netbook, notebook or even desktop start crawling to its knees when in the beginning it was zipping faster than its hard drive counterparts.

With rival Western Digital soon to release their SSDs, the hard drive market will have to battle it out not only with evolving hard drive brands, but existing flash drive and even memory players, who are beginning to etch their mark in the SSD territory.

The sooner this happens, the faster prices of SSDs will come down, and the bigger their capacities will get - but the issue of performance degradation over time still needs to be addressed, otherwise while the initial reaction to users may be great, the accumulative post-reaction of performance drop will soon make people do a double take.

If the extra speed is worth dumping hard drives for - the hope is to at least see SSDs maintain their performances over time.

Yes, Microsoft’s Windows 7 may have the TRIM SSD command, which helps in this performance slowdown, but on the long rum, it still doesn’t solve this issue.