Seagate has unveiled what it claims to be "the world's fastest ever SSD" which is a 16-lane PCIe (PCIe x16) SSD which provides data transfer of up to 10 GB/s.

During the Open Compute Project Summit which took place this week in San Jose, Seagate unveiled two new enterprise NVMe SSDs that offer some impressive specifications and performance. Based on PICe x16 and PCIe x8 interfaces, these new drives provides up to 10GB/s and 6.7GB/s of sequential performance, respectively.

Unfortunately, Seagate did not provide much information regarding the actual specifications so it is still not clear which controller was used in these drives, since most current SSD controllers support up to four PCI-lanes. Of course, Seagate has acquired Sandforce from Avago/LSI earlier in 2014 so it is safe to assume that this is a new controller that comes as a result of Seagate's development team at Sandforce.

The new PCIe NVMe SSD from Seagate are now production ready and are to be available to customers this summer.

According to a report from Anandtech.com, it is possible that Seagate is using some sort of multi-controller solution paired up with a PCIe switch in order to provide full 16-lane interface. It could also be possibly based on multiple M.2 SSDs paired on the same SSD, most likely four Nytro XM1440 M.2 drives.

In any case, the 10GB/s performance is, according to Seagate, 4GB/s faster than any competing SSD on the market. Seagate was also quite keen to note that the 8-lane version will offer cost and power savings over the 16-lane drive.

We are sure looking forward to see more information on these SSDs as Seagate can still surprise us with specifications.





Source: Seagate.com.