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Seagate is the worldwide leader in the design, manufacture and
marketing of hard disk
drives, providing products
for a wide-range of applications, including Enterprise, Desktop, Mobile
Computing, Consumer Electronics and Branded Solutions. Seagate's business model
leverages technology leadership and world-class manufacturing to deliver
industry-leading innovation and quality to its global customers, with the goal
of being the low cost producer in all markets in which it participates. The
company is committed to providing award-winning products, customer support and
reliability to meet the world's growing demand for information storage. Seagate
can be found around the globe and at www.seagate.com.
see also:-
Seagate
- editor mentions on STORAGEsearch and
Seagate's
SSD page
- editor's comments:- October 2011 -
Seagate entered the SSD
market later than most other multibillion dollar storage companies in
December 2009.
In contrast
Samsung had declared
SSDs to be a strategic market in 2005.
Seagate has eschewed
acquisition and badge
engineering as
routes into the SSD
market and instead seems to be relying on a combination of in-house
designs mixed with licensing some missing IP.
Seagate has never
appeared in the fastest
SSDs lists but it has appeared recently in the
top 20 SSD companies list.
If you're considering SSDs from Seagate then you should also look
at the dozens of competing (and more experienced) oems in each of these
directories:-
PCIe SSDs,
2.5" SSDs. |
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In March
2008 -
Seagate launched
an SSD patent suit against STEC. This attempt to stall the SSD market by
scaring wannabe oems was unsuccessful.
In December 2009 -
Seagate entered the SSD
market and announced details of its
Pulsar SSD
- a 2.5" SATA SLC SSD with 200GB capacity.
Sequential R/W rate
is upto 240MB/s and 220MB/s respectively, R/W IOPS are 30,000 and 25,000
respectively. Aimed at the server market the BER is quoted as 1 sector per
10E16. Seagate says it has been sampling the new drive - its 1st SSD - since
September 2009.
Editor's comments:- the remarkable thing about
Seagate's 1st SSD is that it took the company so many years to enter the market.
Technically - it's unremarkable.
Will it succeed in the market? In my
view it would be unrealistic to assume that Seagate's long running dominance
in the hard disk market
will translate to dominance in SSDs too - because nearly all its potential oem
customers have already been evaluating or using SSDs from other sources for
upto 4 years.
And
even if Seagate's new product succeeds in filling holes in design slots in
2010 - its oem customers can always replace this product with their own designs
leveraging the merchant market for
SSD controllers & IP.
To succeed in the SSD market - Seagate will have to demonstrate unique
mastery in some aspect of SSD technology which customers value. The most
attractive area will probably be in the area of
reliability.
In
recent quarters we've seen a spate of
flaky SSDs get to
market. This tendency will rise in 2010 as many storage oems - racing to join
the SSD market bubble
- decide that shipping untried products is a lower risk to their businesses
than losing out on customer mind share. Each bad news story helps companies who
have a clean reputation. But as a newcomer to the SSD market Seagate may have
to wait years to establish its own reputation.
It's tempting to
compare Seagate's entry to the SSD market with
Western Digital. But
the 2 cases are completely different. When WD acquired
SiliconSystems
in March 2009 - it got a business which had started marketing SSDs in August
2004. That gives WD's product marketers 5 years of market experience they can
talk to customers about - compared to 3 months for Seagate. Nevertheless - being
late is better than never.
In January 2010 -
LSI and
Seagate
announced
they have collaborated on designing
PCIe SSDs for the
enterprise accelerator market which will sample in Q2 2010.
In
May 2010 -
Seagate
launched the
Momentus
XT a 2.5" hybrid
drive - for the
notebook PC
market - which internally has a 500GB
HDD cached by a 4GB
SSD ASAP controller.
Seagate said the new drive is OS agnostic and delivers
SSD-like
performance at the lower
price of a hard
drive.
In August 2010 - Samsung and Seagate
announced
they will jointly develop
SSD controller
technologies to operate with Samsung's 30nm-class MLC NAND. The jointly
developed controller will be used in
Seagate's
enterprise-class SSDs.
In January 2011 -
Seagate was ranked #13
in the top 20 SSD
companies list - its highest position since the series began 4 years ago.
In
March 2011 - Seagate
announced details of new
2.5"
SAS SSDs - marketed
under its Pulsar brand
- which will ship in the 2nd quarter.
Available capacities are 400GB
(SLC) and 800GB (MLC). R/W speeds are upto 360MB/s and 300MB/s respectively.
Sustainable random R/W
IOPS are
48K and 22K respectively.
In March 2011 -
Seagate announced
details of new 2.5"
SAS SSDs - marketed
under its Pulsar brand
- which will ship in the 2nd quarter. Available capacities are 400GB (SLC) and
800GB (MLC). R/W speeds are upto 360MB/s and 300MB/s respectively.
Sustainable random R/W
IOPS are
48K and 22K respectively. |
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| "Considering what
it had to gain (or lose) from the industry transition to solid state storage -
Seagate stood on the sidelines for many years too long - saying SSD was
a silly game, it didn't like the rules and didn't want to play." |
| ...Editor:- from the
new edition of
the Top SSD Companies. | | |
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| don't all PCIe SSDs
look pretty much the same? |
When you look at the
photos and headline specs for high speed PCIe SSDs - it's easy to come away with
the impression that they all look the same and have about the same performance.
After
all - how different can they be?
But don't let the experience of the
2.5" SSD market -
in which clusters of consumer SSD vendors use the
same or similar
controllers and hover
close together inpopular
(consumer) performance rankings - give you the wrong idea about
PCIe SSDs.
In
this market the performance limits and capabilities of the SSD aren't set by an
old hard disk interface
and package limitations.
In the PCIe market the products you get are
limited only by the imagination of the designers - tempered by the guesses of
marketers who are trying to predict the optimum (most salable) features for an
ideal SSD. |
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| Seagate's
new 2.5" SAS SSDs |
Editor:- March 15, 2011 - Seagate announced
details of new 2.5"
SAS SSDs -
marketed under its Pulsar
brand - which
will ship in the 2nd quarter.
Available capacities are
400GB
(SLC) and
800GB
(MLC). R/W speeds are upto 360MB/s and 300MB/s respectively. Sustainable
random R/W IOPS
are 48K and 22K respectively.
Endurance is
quoted as 35 / 10 full drive writes per day SLC / MLC. Unrecoverable read
errors (data
integrity) for the SLC model are 1 in 1016 . Seagate also
quotes a permissive rate of ambient temperature change for its MLC SSD - which
is something else we may be hearing more about in future.
Editor's
comments:- one of the problems Seagate has in being a latecomer to the SSD
market is that it hasn't yet racked up enough "million customer operating
years" to support reliability messages tagged to the new SSD launch. So
instead it's using cross over references from its HDD business - as in this
statement - "Over 200 man-years of development went into the
2nd-generation Pulsar SSD products, with enterprise reliability verified by a
team with over 1,500 collective years of experience in the storage industry."
SSD market
history in recent years teaches us that experience in other markets
(even within the semiconductor industry) doesn't always guarantee that new
SSD designs will be as reliable,
trouble free or as
fast as their
creators anticipate. That's because many new design features in flash SSD
architectures get their first reality checks in the market. |
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I expect that if all goes
well - next year Seagate's new SSD announcements will start referring back to
their SSD market track record. And if all doesn't go well - we're hear about
it on these news pages. | | | |
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