Seagate Introduces 10GB/s PCIe SSD And 60TB SAS SSD
by Billy Tallis on August 9, 2016 8:01 AM EST- Posted in
- SSDs
- Storage
- Seagate
- Flash Memory Summit
Seagate is looking to break records with two enterprise SSDs they're showing off at Flash Memory Summit this week. The first drive is one that's been seen before: the 10GB/s PCIe x16 SSD that Seagate demonstrated in March. It has now been named the Nytro XP7200 and is scheduled for mass production in Q4. Based on four Nytro XM1440 M.2 SSDs under one heatsink on a full height expansion card, the XP7200 is more of a backplane than a drive on its own. Unlike some other multi-controller PCIe SSDs, the XP7200 does not include a PCIe switch chip. This means that the card can only be fully utilized in PCIe x16 slots that support operation as four separate x4 links. Plugging the XP7200 into a PCIe x8 slot would render two of the four M.2 drives inaccessible. And because there are four independent NVMe SSDs on the card, hitting the peak advertised read speed of 10GB/s requires the use of software-based RAID-0 or a similar striping scheme.
| Seagate Nytro XP7200 specifications | |||
| Capacities | 3.8 TB, 7.7 TB | ||
| Interface | PCIe 3 x16 | ||
| Sequential read | 10000 MB/s | ||
| Sequential write | 3600 MB/s | ||
| Random read IOPS | 940K | ||
| Random write IOPS | 160K | ||
| Power during mixed R/W | 26 W | ||
The performance specifications of the XP7200 show clearly the impact of using the capacity-optimized XM1440 models rather than the endurance optimized versions. Despite boasting total sequential read speeds of 10GB/s and almost one million IOPS for 4kB random reads, the write performance isn't earth-shattering. The XP7200 will be available in capacities of either 3.8TB or 7.7TB, as a result of populating it with either the 960GB XM1440 or the newer 2TB model.
With the Nytro XP7200 moving toward production, Seagate has brought out another SSD tech demo with eye-catching specifications. The unnamed SAS SSD packs 60TB of 3D TLC into a 3.5" drive. In order to connect over a thousand dies of Micron's 3D TLC NAND to a single SSD controller, Seagate has introduced ONFi bridge chips to multiplex the controller's NAND channels across far more dies than would otherwise be possible. The rest of the specs for the 60TB SSD look fairly mundane and make for a drive that's better suited to read-intensive workloads, but the capacity puts even the latest hard drives to shame.
| Seagate 60TB SAS SSD Specifications | |||
| Usable capacity | 60 TB | ||
| Interface | Dual port 12Gb/s SAS | ||
| Sequential read | 1500 MB/s | ||
| Sequential write | 1000 MB/s | ||
| Random read IOPS | 150K | ||
| Random write IOPS | unknown | ||
| Peak power | 15 W | ||
The 60TB SSD is currently just a technology demonstration, and won't be appearing as a product until next year. When it does, it will probably have a very tiny market, but for now it will give Seagate some bragging rights.
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danwat1234 - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
No pics of the 60TB SSD? why?..zodiacfml - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
If Samsung's 15TB drive costs $10K, then what is this, $40K?Icehawk - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
I would expect it to run more than 4x the cost of the 15tb drive based on typical pricing schemasrUmX - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
Agreed. A single large 60TB drive over 4x15TB? There's a huge premium for that.fanofanand - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
This is an incredible product, based on my experience with Seagate it should brick itself precisely 10 days after warranty expiration.Pirun - Wednesday, August 17, 2016 - link
Sorry to say,and its unfortunate,but most of you guys are really lacking knowledge,so please don't comment.PCI-E SSDs are a big marketing trick,they do not make a difference in almost any scenario and its a complete waste of money if you buy one.If they release an SSD with 3-4x higher 4k random read speeds,that is going to make a Slight improvement in every storage intensive task,but until then,stick with the typical sata 3 ssds.negusp - Sunday, August 21, 2016 - link
Sorry to say that it seems you are completely lacking knowledge.There are many usages for PCI-E SSDs in the Enterprise and business world, where extra speed and more capacity are needed. However, I do agree that for consumers PCIE SSD's are of no benefit. You can't simply generalize that these SSD's are completely worthless and provide no benefit to the entire market.Magichands8 - Saturday, July 15, 2017 - link
Sorry but SATA is trash. I can't tell you how many times I've moved around files of hundreds of megabytes or even muti-GB files and had to put up with the incredible frustration of having to wait for the system to finish doing what I've told it to do. Having to rely on all these slow HDDs with all these moving parts any of which could malfunction thereby transforming themselves into a massive pain in the ass to recover and/or replace data that already took a massive amount of time to produce and accumulate. Having to deal with RAID arrays with all of their own complications and hidden costs, ridiculously long rebuild times, added heat, power and noise tradeoffs and inherent limitations. It's the 21st century. There is absolutely no excuse. In the business world, time is money. In the non-business world time wasted is time out of your life you'll never get back. If you're an enterprise desk monkey at least you're on someone's clock waiting for your process to finish, whatever it may be. SSDs, and PCI-E SSDs, are a massive step up on almost every level. You sound just like people who used to say that 64k is all the memory a computer will ever need or those who poo-pooed SSDs providing any real benefit for consumers over HDDs. Many people will never NEED PCI-E speeds just like many people will never NEED 50 or 100gb/s download speeds but at the same time there's also no excuse for not bringing higher capacities and higher speeds to market. The technology is there.Lower power, faster transfer speeds, higher capacities, increased reliability, less noise, cooler operating equipment, simpler storage. To you maybe these things don't mean anything but to this consumer you're the one who doesn't know what he's talking about.
We'll see what happens next year when the industry stops dragging its ass so much and starts releasing SSDs with higher capacities. I for one have no interest in or patience for migrating/managing gigabytes and even terabytes of data at SATA speeds and I'll bet I'm not the only one. We'll see.