Seagate launches their Pulsar SSD

Today Seagate announced their new SSD offering, named the Pulsar SSD.  It uses SLC NAND technology and comes in a 2.5″ form factor at 50, 100 or 200GB capacity.  The fact that it uses a 3GB/s SATA interface seems to indicate that Seagate is going after the server market rather than the highend storage market place but different interfaces can be added over time.

Pulsar SSD performance

The main fact that makes the Pulsar interesting is the peak write rates at 25,000 4KB aligned writes per second versus a peak read rate of 30,000.  The ratio of peak reads to peak writes 30:25 represents a significant advance over prior SSDs and presumably this is through the magic of buffering.  But once we get beyond peak IO buffering sustained 128KB writes drops to 2600, 5300, or 10,500 ops/sec for the 50, 100, and 200GB drives respectively.  Kind of interesting that this drops as capacity drops and implies that adding capacity also adds parallelism. Sustained 4KB reads for the Pulsar is speced at 30,000.

In contrast, STEC’s Zeus drive is speced at 45,000 random reads and 15,000 random writes sustained and 80,000 peak reads and 40,000 peak writes.  So performance wise the Seagate Pulsar (200GB) SSD has about ~37% the peak read and ~63% the peak write performance with ~67% the sustained read with ~70% the sustained write performance of the Zeus drive.

Pulsar reliability

The other items of interest is that Seagate states a 0.44% annual failure rate (AFR), so for a 100 Pulsar drive storage subsystem one Pulsar drive will fail every 2.27 years.  Also the Pulsar bit error rate (BER) is specified at <10E16 new and <10E15 at end of life.  As far as I can tell both of these specifications are better than STEC’s specs for the Zeus drive.

Both the Zeus and Pulsar drives support a 5 year limited warranty.  But if the Pulsar is indeed a more reliable drive as indicated by their respective specifications, vendors may prefer the Pulsar as it would require less service.

All this seems to say that reliability may become a more important factor in vendor SSD selection. I suppose once you get beyond 10K read or write IOPs per drive, performance differences just don’t matter that much. But a BER of 10E14 vs 10E16 may make a significant difference to product service cost and as such, may justify changing SSD vendors much easier. Seems to be opening up a new front in the SSD wars – drive reliability

Now if they only offered 6GB/s SAS or 4GFC interfaces…