Seagate Intros Its First Enterprise SSD

Seagate introduced its first solid-state drive for blade and general servers.

Seagate Pulsar

The Pulsar is the first of what will be a line of enterprise SSDs. The 2.5-inch, single-level cell drive has a SATA interface and is available with up to 200 GB of storage.

The Pulsar has a peak performance of up to 30,000 read input/output operations per second and 25,000 write IOPS. In terms of data, the SSD has a read/write rate of 240 MB per second and 200 MB/s, respectively.

Seagate has been shipping the Pulsar to select computer manufacturers since September. The device, which comes with a five-year limited warranty, is now generally available.

Soaring memory prices have derailed efforts to replace hard disk drives with SSDs in laptops. However, growing use of SSDs in data centers will drive a sevenfold increase in market revenue this year to $883 million, according to iSuppli. Units shipments will rise to 5.8 million units from 1.4 million in 2008.

SSD vendors expect next year and 2011 to also be exceptionally strong years as data centers and IT computing infrastructures ramp up adoption, analysts say. Among the touted benefits of SSDs over HDDs are faster input/output operations, lower power usage, and smaller size. All these factors can help reduce costs in a data center, justifying the much higher price for SSDs.

The total market for SSD will rise to $10.8 billion by 2013, a compound annual growth rate of 142.8% from 2008, according to iSuppli. Shipments will increase 115.6% to 65.2 million units by 2013.

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