World’s Fastest Standalone Enterprise SSHD: Seagate Intros

Source: http://hendrengroup.biz/blog/2013/10/12/worlds-fastest-standalone-enterprise-sshd-seagate-intros/

Seagate Technology said that it is now shipping the industry’s first enterprise solid state hybrid drive (SSHD), the Seagate Enterprise Turbo SSHD. It incorporates the NAND flash of an SSD with the spinning magnetic platters of a mechanical HDD, building a single storage solution with high-speed data transfers and huge storage capacities. As comparing with the existing 15K RPM drives on the market, the end-users will supposedly see up to triple the random performance compared to.

June this year, the news arrives after Seagate and IBM introduced the IBM G2HS Hybrid and the IBM G2SS Hybrid as storage options for the IBM Series X Servers. The two were 2.5 inch drives that provided 600 GB of storage, 16 GB of eMLC NAND Flash and a 128 MB DRAM data buffer. There are also other features such as 10K RPM platter speeds, a SAS interface, a drive-to-host interface that supports up to 6 Gbps, and a drive media to buffer interface. The average sustained transfer rate was 151 MB/s and the average rotational latency was 2.9 ms.

“Over the past year, Seagate and IBM have been putting an enterprise SSHD prototype through its paces,” the company said. “After months of testing in Seagate and IBM labs, the first enterprise SSHD has been introduced.”

According to Seagate, the new Enterprise Turbo SSHD drive caches at the I/O level, thus addressing performance gaps and bottlenecks often found in tiered system environments. A self-encrypting drive option to maximize security for data-at-rest, and up to 600 GB of storage, the highest enterprise performance drive available today is also being offered.

The Enterprise Turbo SSHD enables lower cost server and storage configurations, making it appealing for OEMs and system builders who demand the highest, scalable performance at an affordable cost, Seagate added. Since it’s extremely efficient and economical, the drive provides a significantly improved dollar to IOPS ratio.

“Typically the most demanding mission critical applications for 15K drives have improved performance by compromising on capacity and cost per GB,” said Rocky Pimentel, Seagate executive vice president and chief sales and marketing officer. “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.”

Seagate said that a 10K RPM version of an enterprise SSHD boasts IOPS over two times better than a standard 600 GB 10K RPM hard disk drive basing on results presented by the Storage Performance Council. The company added “the end result is much improved and more cost effective performance for servers running mission critical applications such as big data analytics, virtual desktop infrastructure, and database and transaction processing.”