14 DAY TRIAL // Keeping up with the growing trend of releasing datacenter-oriented solid-state drives, Micron and Seagate are launching the Micron S600DC-series and the Seagate S1200.2-series.
Using Micron's advanced NAND flash chips together with Seagate's SAS-related technologies, the two drives feature dual-port serial attached SCSI (SAS-12Gb/s) interface, 2.5” form-factor, up to 4TB capacity, up to 1800MB/s sequential read speed, and up to 800MB/s sequential write speed, together with 210K random read IOPS.
The drives will feature end-to-end data protection, TGC enterprise encryption, and many other features that are usually found in enterprise-class SSDs.
The new lineup of SSDs from Micron and Seagate includes models designed and optimized for different workloads. Another reason that explains why they have different levels of performance and endurance is the fact that they have different drive writes per day. As such, the two SSD lines come with models that start with one DWPD and go up to twenty-five DWPD.
Although selling under different names, the S600DC-series and the S1200.2-series solid-state drives are completely identical, as they come with the same Micron NAND flash memory, they have the same memory controller, and are even made in the same production facility.
Acceptable SSDs for now, but great research plans for the future
It's interesting how Micron starts to get more visibility after Tsinghua's attempt at buying the company a few weeks ago. Although working together with Seagate in producing rather unimpressive SSDs, the company does actually spend a lot of money in researching remarkable and quite advanced memory technologies like the 3D XPoint, which promises access times and read/write speeds at least ten times faster than present day NAND flash and DRAM.
In fact, the 3D XPoint is so advanced that it can't even run properly on current-gen PCIe interfaces, needing at least PCIe NVMe to deliver the tenfold increase in performance, while a future PCIe 5.0 interface will provide hundreds of times faster performance than current-day NAND flash.
Right now, however, Micron's research plans are daring, but their business plans in the SSD market could in fact turn much better in the future while their partnership with Seagate lasts.
The Micron S600DC and the Seagate 1200.2 SAS SSDs will be available to vendors in August 2015.
