Seagate has finally and seriously joined in on the SSD market and launched its first full lineup ranging from consumer/client Seagate 600 SSD, entry-level enterprise and enthusiast 600 Pro, all the way to enterprise Seagate 1200 SSD and Seagate X8 Accelerator.

The client, or precisely consumer side, will feature Seagate 600 and 600 Pro SATA 6Gbps drives, both based on custom Link_A_Media Devices (LAMD) LM87800 controller and paired up with 19nm Toshiba MLC NAND. These consumer drives will both feature standard 2.5-inch form factor, SATA 6Gbps interface and DDR2-800 cache. There is not much difference between the Seagate 600 and the Seagate 600 Pro. Other than different capacities and form factor, since the Seagate 600 will be available in both 5mm and 7mm versions, the Seagate 600 Pro features an array of capacitors for power loss protection, better binned NAND and higher 5 year warranty.

The Seagate 600 will be available in 480, 240 and 120GB capacities with 7mm height and same those with 5mm height. According to Seagate, it will offer random 4K read and write performance of up to 80/70K IOPS (80/60K on the 120GB model) and sustained sequential read/Write speeds of over 500/400MB/s (500/300MB/s on the 120GB model).

Since it uses better binned NAND chips, the Seagate 600 Pro will offer sequential read/write speeds of up to 520/450MB/s (520/300MB/s on the 120 and 100GB models) as well as random 4K read/write of up to 85/30K IOPS. You can check out precise performance on tables below. As noted earlier, the Seagate 600 Pro will be available with different capacities and only with 7mm-thick 2.5-inch case so you will see 480, 400, 240, 200, 120 and 100GB models. Bear in mind that it is all about provisioning as 400, 200 and 100GB SKUs will have somewhat better random read/write performance.

On the enterprise side, Seagate decided to launch the Seagate 1200 SSD, featuring 12Gb/s SAS interface and custom Seagate controller and the Seagate X8 Accelerator, featuring PCI-Express interface and an ability to move NAND management from the SSD to the host CPU in the server.

Unfortunately, Seagate did not talk about price of its consumer/client Seagate 600/600 Pro or its enterprise lineup, but only said that it will be priced in line with the competition. In any case it is nice that Seagate finally and seriously joined the SSD race as competition will drive prices down and consumers are those that will benefit the most.


Seagate 600/600 Pro


Seagate 600


Seagate 600 Pro


Seagate 1200/x8 Accelerator

Source: Seagate.com.