Seagate revamps enterprise drive line-up

Seagate is revamping its enterprise storage line-up including a solid state drive that has an exclusive flavor of NAND memory to provide better reliability.

The solid state drive is the first product from a partnership with Samsung. Following reliability and endurance problems with SSDs in the data center, Seagate teamed up with Samsung to create something that had more heft. The SSD, dubbed the Pulsar.2 MLC, is "the first fruit from our partnership with Samsung," said Rich Vignes, senior product line manager, SSD. "This NAND is exclusive to Seagate."

The Pulsar.2 can write 15,000 terabytes over its lifetime. An XT version can write 25,000 terabytes.

Seagate's enterprise overhaul comes at an interesting time. Seagate primarily competes with Hitachi and Toshiba in the enterprise. Western Digital, a rival on the consumer side of the market, bought Hitachi's digital unit last week to better compete in the business market. Seagate hasn't issued a formal response on the Western Digital-Hitachi merger.

Not every application will need an SSD, but Seagate expects 5 to 10 percent of the enterprise market to use those drives. Today the market penetration of enterprise SSDs is less than 1 percent, said Teresa Worth, enterprise product marketing manager at Seagate. In a nutshell, hot data---information that needs to be accessed quickly---is moving to SSDs while other drives handle data that's not as time sensitive. As costs come down and endurance and reliability improves, SSDs will become more of an option.

In the meantime, Seagate is also revamping its traditional drives. New products include:

• The Savvio 15K.3: A 2.5-inch drive that comes in 900, 600, 450, and 300 GB versions. Idle power watts range from 4.4 for the 900 GB drive to 3.5 for the 300 GB version. These drives work for tier 1 servers and storage.
• Constellation ES.2: A 3.5-inch drive with a capacity of 3TB and an average read/write time of 8.5 to 9.5 milliseconds.