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. (more…)

Seagate used a Barracuda 7200.12 SATA-based hard disk drive in the tech demo with their new SATA 6.0Gb/s prototype Barracuda drive.

T&A: Seagate has teamed up with microprocessor manufacturer Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) at the Everything Channel Xchange Conference in New Orleans to publicly demonstrate the next-gen high-speed data transfer of data — yes, serial ATA 6 Gigabit/second - for bandwidth-hungry desktop and notebook PC apps.

Known as the 3rd generation in SATA transfer speed standards, Serial ATA (SATA) 6Gb/second storage interface will be backward compatible with SATA 3Gb/second (2nd gen) and SATA 1.5Gb/second (1st gen) interfaces. The 3rd gen interface will enhance power efficiency and improve Native Command Queuing, which will be beneficial for apps with heavy transactional workloads. 

The demo itself features two Seagate SATA disk drives — one a commercial Barracuda 7200.12 3Gb/second hard drive and the other a prototype Barracuda 6Gb/second drive. The PC is powered by an AMD prototype SATA 6Gb/second chipset. (Editor opinions: 1)

Vijay Anand, Editor, HardwareZone.com

Vijay (HardwareZone.com): While it’s good to have a speedier interface, the current mechanical hard drives on first generation SATA (1.5Gbps), let alone 3Gbps standards have yet to reach a saturation point in consumer satisfaction levels.

For the SATA 6Gbps standard to become popular, hard disk drive manufacturers might want to position it with radically fast top-of-the-line Solid State Disk (SSD) drives. (more…)