Thread: Seagate introduced the first SSD, the Pulsar, with impressive specs

Seagate is the world's leading producer of hard drives, a product in the heart of its business since the founding of the company 30 years ago. This week the U.S. Corporation has launched the Pulsar, the foremost flash disk (or else SSD). It is therefore a significant development, which comes after two years of study, and a little over a year after its chairman has said that he did not enter the market immediately.

The Pulsar has a maximum capacity of 200GB and it adopts the traditional format for this type of product, 2 inch and a half, but with a fine reduced to 7 mm. Under the hood, we find 50, 100 or 200 GB of flash memory type SLC, engraved in 34 nanometers. To be more precise, they are DSS 64, 128 and 256 GB, with about 27% of space used by the cleanup, and any bad blocks. The DSS takes Seagate Serial ATA 3Gb / s as an interface, and offers sequential rates of 240 MB / s read and 220 MB / s write.

The DSS is concerned primarily with business users, Seagate mentions values of 30 000 read IOPS and 25 000 write IOPS. Pulsar uses a controller with 16 channels, its origin is unknown and Seagate refuses to comment on this subject yet. Another curiosity, no cache would be present, only a small buffer. If we attack the details, the figures mentioned by Seagate are very impressive, better than the Intel X25-E, the reference at present. Note however that the performance varies depending on the models, the values we report are those of more powerful, 200 GB

Because of its position, Seagate must assure the reliability of flash drives over hard disks, the U.S. firm announced that its Pulsar displays AFR (annual failure rate) of 0.44%, and is guaranteed for 5 years. This value hides another, more interesting; Seagate says that its disk can operate at maximum speed, continuously for 5 years! The 50GB does bear some 1.5 petabyte of 4 KB random writes while the 200 GB up to 6 petabytes!

The storage giant, now on every type of media confused, moves its SSD with OEM since September. It should be available at retail in the first quarter of next year. If the Pulsar offers really what Seagate promises, it provides an excellent introduction to the subject. If rates are lower than those applied on Intel's X25-E, the newcomer could have a significant impact on the small world of high-end SSD!