Seagate Technology has unveiled its new lineup of performance-optimized solid-state drives (SSDs) designed for enterprise customers. Seagate became the first maker of hard disk drives (HDDs) that introduced a lineup of SSDs for enterprises and also the first hard drive manufacturer that decided to use both single-level cell (SLC) and multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory.

Seagate specifically positions its second-generation Pulsar solid-state drives for enterprise users and maces emphasize on their reliability rather than on pure performance. Both the Pulsar.2 and Pulsar XT.2 drives leverage Seagate’s experience in product development, qualification, fulfillment and ongoing support. Seagate declares 0.44% annual failure rate (AFR) and 2 million hour meantime between failure (MTBF) rating for the Pulsar XT.2 and Pulsar.2 SSDs. Since the novelties are not designed for desktops or laptops, they can use Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) 6Gb/s interface.

The Pulsar.2 SSD is the first MLC NAND flash-powered solid-state drive from an enterprise HDD vendor delivering the price/performance, data integrity, and endurance needed for performance-hungry enterprise applications. The drive can automatically detect and correct a multitude of data errors than can occur during normal drive operations to deliver the highest levels of enterprise-class data integrity and endurance. The Pulsar.2 supports both native 6Gb/s SAS and SATA 6Gb/s interfaces and available in 100GB, 200GB, 400GB and 800GB capacities.

The Pulsar XT.2 is SLC NAND-based, comes in 100GB, 200GB and 400GB capacities and features native SAS 6Gb/s interface. According to the maker, the Pulsar XT.2 SSD delivers the highest levels of consistent performance, data integrity, and drive endurance for the most demanding enterprise environments. The Pulsar XT.2 is the fastest drive in the Seagate portfolio, with sustainable random reads at 48K and writes at 22K IOPS and sequential reads at 360MB/s and writes at 300MB/s.

The Pulsar XT.2 is currently shipping to OEMs. Both the Pulsar XT.2 and Pulsar.2 will be generally available to the channel beginning Q2 of this year.

“HP continues to see new opportunities for solid state storage technology as customers increase virtual system workloads, needing higher performance while reducing power requirements. HP continues to look forward to storage technology advances from Seagate including wider SSD enablement across HP systems and workloads," said Jim Ganthier, HP industry standard software and systems vice president of marketing.

Tags: Seagate, SSD, Pulsar