The market offers a wide variety of solid-state drives, with speeds that amaze any user of traditional hard drives, but this is nothing more than the tip of the iceberg. With a change of interface and a new specification, SSDs can reach terrifying levels, which brings us to the next Seagate drive aimed at the enterprise world. This “small” monster will offer ten gigabytes per second of transfer, thus becoming the fastest SSD on the planet.
It's hard to believe, but it's true: the SATA interface hinders the development of SSDs. The average user has no great reason to complain when a benchmark yields 400-500 megabytes per second, and the 3.2 revision of the SATA standard talks about 1,900 megabytes per second as a maximum, but we know well that solid state in general can go further. All it needs (in very relaxed terms) is to become a PCI Express card, and gain access to a much higher bandwidth (the 3.0 specification announces about 15.7 gigabytes per second). Of course… something extra is needed in the recipe, and that “something” is NVM Express technology, which acts as a logical interface to connect non-volatile storage media with the PCI Express bus. NVM Express already has several isolated representatives in the market, but soon it will become a key piece for Seagate to set a new record.
For now, all we know about this future card is a small render, with an appearance similar to another Seagate product, the Nytro XP6500 accelerator, which depending on its configuration reaches about 4 GB/s (2.2 GB/s write). The new Seagate SSD will leave that accelerator spinning like a top, delivering a spectacular 10 gigabytes per second transfer. The 10 GB/s version will adopt a PCI Express x16 configuration, but Seagate confirmed in the official announcement that it is about to finalize a PCI Express x8 version, with 6.7 GB/s, more economically attractive for interested companies. The manufacturer did not provide details about capacity, although if we take the 4 terabyte limit of the Nytro accelerator as reference, it will probably be at the same level.
Another important fact is that the new Seagate SSD will be compatible with the OCP specification that Facebook launched in 2011, and that many other companies have adopted since then. Depending on each case, the SSD can work under an “all-flash” configuration, or as an accelerator module for servers with conventional hard drives. The formal launch will be during the summer. 10 gigabytes per second… we want this on our desktops now.
