Seagate Technology has unveiled the fastest single solid-state drive (SSD) demonstrated to date, with throughput performance of 10 gigabytes per second (GB/s). The company expects to begin selling the 10GB/s unit this summer. The SSD is 4GB/s faster than the previous fastest industry SSD on the market and meets the OCP storage specifications being driven by Facebook, which may help reduce the high power and costs that come along with performance at this level.
A drawing of the demo unit that was on display at the OCP Summit. (Image Credit: Seagate)
“Your data is only as good as how easily you can access it and put it to use,” said Brett Pemble, Seagate’s general manager and vice president of SSD Products. “Seagate is committed to providing the full spectrum of technologies to help meet the diverse needs of organizations so they can unlock this value. Whether for consumer cloud or business applications, this SSD will help improve on demands for fast access to information, where split seconds drive incremental value gains.”
The technology will be compatible with systems that support the Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) protocol, developed by Seagate to replace the legacy Serial AT Attachment (SATA) standards and eliminate informational bottlenecks. NVMe helps reduce layers of commands, which creates faster and simpler communications between flash devices.
The new device will be geared toward organizations that process data for object storage or in real-time—in situations where speed matters for desirable results. Some examples of such applications include large-scale cloud providers and web applications, weather modeling, and statistical trends analysis. The unit could also be used in an all-flash array or as an accelerated flash tier with hard-disk drives (HDDs) as a hybrid storage alternative.
In addition to the debut of the 10GB/s SSD technology that comes equipped with 16-lane PCIe slots, Seagate is working on a second unit for eight-lane PCIe slots, which performs at the industry-leading throughput of 6.7GB/s. The eight-lane solution will provide an alternative for organizations looking for high levels of throughput speed in environments limited by power usage requirements or cost.