Seagate Announces Pulsar SSDs for Enterprises

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El_Capitan

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It's nice to see a leading HDD company adapting to the storage solutions climate with product development rather than marketing. However, if it's reliability these "enterprises" are looking for, shoving products out to enthusiasts to get feedback and critiques is the best way for these enterprises to show how well they're faring on their new SSD venture... though perhaps they don't want that to happen for fear of what problems will be pointed out to them later down the line.

Reliability is key for enterprise storage solutions, with speed, capacity, and cost being determined from a company-to-company basis. I'd be more tempted to buy an Intel SSD had I not read about so many issues about stuttering, failures, bricks from trim firmware updates, lack of trim firmware updates, etc.

Not to mention the cost. If a company's making money already with the storage solution they already have, why spend more to make things faster when they can just optimize their current set-up? There's no reason to take that chance, it's just too risky.
 
It's a bold move to say the least; but it was only a matter of time before enterprise SSD's started to make an appearance. Hopefully, enterprises won't be turned off by the high price tag.
 

back_by_demand

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Seagate Maxtor was always going to make an entry to the SSD market, it was just a matter of when. I personally am enjoying my OCZ drive, but the future will be Seagate pumping out drive after drive and costs plumetting.
 

amnotanoobie

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[citation][nom]jacobdrj[/nom]Why are we not seeing more hybrid drives, particularly in the Enterprise market?[/citation]

Because they particularly weren't very effective. I believe there was a review of a hybrid drive from another manufacturer and it performed pretty much like a normal hard drive (not even challenging the raptor). Also a hybrid drive is harder to make a firmware for, because you'd need to consider two storage locations rather than one.
 

techguy378

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A hybrid drive is only useful if it has enough flash memory to store the entire OS. Since Windows Vista requires about 20GB of space, this would make the cost of a decent performing hybrid drive prohibitive.
 

jacobdrj

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But wouldn't a streamlined OS be expected for the Enterprise, and therefore small 4-8GB hybrids be ideal?
Also, it seems like, for the Enterprise, the data for a database would be stored on the SSD while the OS would be stored on the mechanical drive.
 

back_by_demand

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Please, will people stop banging on about hybrid drives.

They clearly aren't as good as just SSD for access times and read/write, yes, maybe when it comes to nothing as complicated as capacity then there is an edge, but if capacity was the factor then stick with 2Tb HDDs.

The future is SSD and no matter how hard people try, there is no going back and SSDs will get faster and bigger. I can see 2Tb capacity and 1Gb/s speed within 3 years and affordability for even ordinary users.

If this wasn't true then Seagate Maxtor wouldn't have made it's move now.
 

DoofusOfDeath

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Are they crazy? A Pulsar SSD would emit such powerful x-rays that it would wipe itself clean constantly.

Now I'll never trust Seagate.
 
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Probably,if it's a line upto 200GB of SLC SSD,we're talking about +$2000 drives here.
 

jerther

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I'm a bit late on news about SSD reliability. Last I know was that the memory chips had a fixed number of read/write cycles. Is that still true? Because a working server can have LOTS of read/writes and is working 24/24 so a 5 years waranty seems very long to me! Can anyone clarify that?
 

back_by_demand

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[citation][nom]Jerther[/nom]I'm a bit late on news about SSD reliability. Last I know was that the memory chips had a fixed number of read/write cycles. Is that still true? Because a working server can have LOTS of read/writes and is working 24/24 so a 5 years waranty seems very long to me! Can anyone clarify that?[/citation]
Wear levelling ensures that differant sectors are used for re-writes and when sectors fail they are omitted from future use. This is why they are rated at odd numbers like 60Gb instead of 64Gb. This is why they have a MTBF something daft like 1.5 million hours.

Put that into context, 1.5 million hours is over 170 years.

By the time you have got just 2% into that a new range of SSDs will be around with even more stability and it can only get better.
 

shushikiary

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I'll make a comment about the hybrid drives... they had amazing performance. They just tried to sell them to the wrong market. A few large OEM's said that they didnt want to pay an extra 20 dollars a drive for a 300% increase in random read write performance.

Hybrid isnt dead yet.... that's all I'll say, anymore and I'll have to kill anyone who reads this.
 

Hanin33

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[citation][nom]DoofusOfDeath[/nom]Are they crazy? A Pulsar SSD would emit such powerful x-rays that it would wipe itself clean constantly. Now I'll never trust Seagate.[/citation]

NASA has not reported any such issue with Flash Memory in space so i doubt x-rays are of any real concern.. while other forms of radiation emitted by a pulsar surely would... ;)
 

wbedwards

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Hopefully, like in many "new technology" scenarios, breaking into the enterprise market will equal a drop in prices soonish.
 

jerther

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[citation][nom]back_by_demand[/nom]Wear levelling ensures that differant sectors are used for re-writes and when sectors fail they are omitted from future use. This is why they are rated at odd numbers like 60Gb instead of 64Gb. This is why they have a MTBF something daft like 1.5 million hours.Put that into context, 1.5 million hours is over 170 years.By the time you have got just 2% into that a new range of SSDs will be around with even more stability and it can only get better.[/citation]

MTBF is to be interpreted very carefuly... it's more of a buzz word, like Watts for speakers. Unless we can prove that among 5 SSDs, 1 will fail early and the 4 others will never fail which could end up with a MTBF of 170 years but like we both know, SSDs WILL fail one day or another, due to their RW cycle limit.

Well that's my point of view about MTBF. I'd like to hear something else about reliability though! anyone?
 

maestintaolius

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[citation][nom]shushikiary[/nom]I'll make a comment about the hybrid drives... they had amazing performance. They just tried to sell them to the wrong market. A few large OEM's said that they didnt want to pay an extra 20 dollars a drive for a 300% increase in random read write performance.Hybrid isnt dead yet.... that's all I'll say, anymore and I'll have to kill anyone who reads this.[/citation]

Yep, QFT. Darn those NDAs!
 
[citation][nom]Jerther[/nom]I'm a bit late on news about SSD reliability. Last I know was that the memory chips had a fixed number of read/write cycles. Is that still true? Because a working server can have LOTS of read/writes and is working 24/24 so a 5 years waranty seems very long to me! Can anyone clarify that?[/citation]
It's true, but different chips have very different lifetimes. These drives are designed for an enterprise environment, and because of that, they use the faster and more durable (and more expensive) SLC flash, rather than the MLC found in most consumer-level drives. Based on Anand's preview of these drives, they should be able to run at full sustained write speed for 5 years without dying. That's not 5 years "at typical usage patterns" - that's 5 years of writing as fast as you can.
 
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