It provides a threefold performance increase over 15K HDDs

Jul 24, 2013 06:54 GMT  ·  By

HHDs (hybrid hard drives) and SSHDs (solid-state hybrid drives) were invented for consumer systems, initially, but Seagate has decided that they can bring benefits to enterprise systems as well.

In truth, HHDs and SSHDs are the same thing. It's just that some companies use the former and others, like Seagate, like the latter best.

In any event, Seagate has launched a new SSHD, and the first one aimed at enterprise applications.

It is called Seagate Enterprise Turbo SSHD and is described as the fastest enterprise HDD in the world.

Seeing as how its performance is three times as good as that of normal HDDs with 15K platter speeds, that's a claim we don't have trouble believing.

Sure, Western Digital and/or Toshiba are sure to match this offer at some point, but until then, Seagate rules this quadrant.

That said, the top capacity isn't, perhaps, as high as what some may wish or expect: 600 GB.

Seagate may or may not introduce drives of 1 TB to 4 TB in the future. Until then, 600 GB is the best it has, in terms of high-performance storage.

It bears noting that, according to Seagate, 600 GB is "the highest enterprise performance drive available today."

Either way, the greatest asset is the price-performance ratio. Despite being three times faster than mission critical HDDs, the Turbo SSHD doesn't cost much more than a hard drive of similar capacity, and definitely not on the same level as a full-blooded SSD would.

Furthermore, Seagate made it so that the newcomer caches data at the I/O level, thus eliminating performance gaps and bottlenecks. Essentially, it is a way to more easily tune storage tiering.

Finally, the Seagate Enterprise Turbo SSHD can be self-encrypting if customers so wish.

"With the Enterprise Turbo SSHD, we deliver a no compromise drive that provides high-speed performance while enabling customers to leverage all of Turbo's capacity," said Rocky Pimentel, Seagate executive vice president and chief sales and marketing officer.