14 DAY TRIAL // In early March, Seagate has introduced to the world its second generation of solid state drives for enterprise use, and now, more than four months after the official announcement, the Pulsar XT.2 SSDs have finally started to ship into the distribution channel.
The Pulsar XT.2 drives use the standard 2.5-inch form factor and are available in various capacities ranging from 100GB to 400GB.
All of these SSDs target the enterprise market and were optimized for complex, mixed workloads typical for such environments, including online transaction processing (OLTP), database or web indexing, and email.
What this actually means is that besides a specially designed firmware, Seagate has opted for using SLC (Single-Level Cell) NAND memory for the Pulsar XT.2.
This has the advantage of enabling faster write speeds, lower power consumption and higher cell endurance, but is also a lot more expensive than the eMLC memory used in other enterprise SSDs.
Furthermore, Pulsar XT.2 drives were also designed to support both native 6Gb/s SAS and Serial ATA (SATA) 6Gb/s interfaces.
Performance wise, Seagate's SSDs can sustain 128KB read and write sequential transfer speeds of 360MB/s and 300MB/s, respectively, while 4KB random read/write is rated at 48,000/22,000 IOPS.
“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,” concluded the analyst.
Seagate hasn't provided us with any information regarding pricing. The company did however mention that is on track to commence channel shipments of the Pulsar.2 SSD, its first Multi-Level Cell (MLC) Flash-enabled SSD, on July 29.