14 DAY TRIAL // Seagate's Pulsar.2 solid state drive line, the successor to the original pulsar collection, has been formally introduced, but the first tests haven't been carried out yet.
It is tomorrow, on May 9, 2012, that the storage product maker will put the 12 Gbps SAS interface through its paces, during the SCSI Trade Association show.
In a way, this move is similar to the one that HGST, formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technology and now a Western Digital division, made last week.
The main difference is that Seagate did not mention any dual interface options.
On the flip side, the company does specify that 12 Gbps SAS is compatible with hard disk drives, so we should probably get ready for some of those too, whenever they happen to show up.
The Pulsar.2 wasn't detailed in the press release, but the product page on the official website does have the data sheet. We're looking at capacities of 100 GB, 200 GB, 400 GB and 800 GB, MLC NAND Flash chips (multi-level cell), sustained / I/O data transfer speeds of 370/600 MB/s, random read/write performance of up to 48,000/15,000 IOPS, etc.
The press release did explore a different topic though, namely how 12 Gbps SAS compares to PCI Express-based SSDs.
Better scalability and serviceability are the main advantages, the latter owed to SAS drives being hot- swappable. It also doesn't hurt that SAS 12Gbps and 6Gbps drives can be used in a mixed environment, where older SAS controllers are in play.
Seagate hasn't given a list of companies that will choose or have chosen Pulsar.2 for their servers and data centers, but we are willing to bet some clients will be named during the next few days.
Then again, the SAS 12 Gbps standard won't be finished before the end of the year (2012), so even if Seagate does have people on board, it won't ship products before 2013. We wouldn't be surprised if the company made some SAS 12 Gbps HDDs by then.