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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ImSpartacus - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
A tb for $200 is pretty nice. That's, what, four times the cost of an equivalent drive?I think that's not bad at all for a basic boot drive.
Mondozai - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
> four times the cost of an equivalent driveThat's not good enough. If you look at SSD prices, they went sharply down from 2010 to 2013 or so. In the last few years, they have come down at a much slower pace. You should frankly be able to buy a good 1TB SSD for $100, and even that should not be seen as anything revolutionary. Cost parity should be the norm within the next few years, as SSDs are the primary focus of consumers these days. But it won't likely be, at least if progress will continue to be as slow as it is now. (Talking about the consumer space prices).
Gigaplex - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
We're getting there. Give it time.AndrewJacksonZA - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
This, what Gigaplex said.A few years ago a half-terabyte SSD seemed INSANE for a home user to own. Two weeks ago I bought a 500GB Samsung 750 EVO for +-USD110 and considered it a good buy.
Glaurung - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
We're now at the point where most people can replace their hard drives for an affordable amount of money without having to downsize the data they are storing on it. Sadly most PC makers are still shipping old fashioned hard drives as standard.Kevin G - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
That SAS demo has two 12 Gbit channels so I wonder if it could bond those two channels for even more bandwidth. With 60 TB of flash, there should be enough parallel channels to exceed the bandwidth of a single 12 Gbit link so the rest would be up to the SSD controller.DanNeely - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
Because 1500MB/s is only possible over a 12Gb/s link with 100% efficiency (any protocol overhead would make the reported number impossible); I half suspect they already are. It's either that or marketing is padding the numbers.OTOH if the main reason for a dualport setup is so the device can be wired to two different SAS controllers for redundancy multiplexing the IO to use both in normal operations would be an interesting software challenge for their driver team. (Assuming it's not already a done deal; I'm not up on the details of high end enterprise storage.)
Kraszmyl - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
Its definitely already a thing and you don't even need high end to do it. Allows for multiserver access to a single storage array or for redundant sas controllers hooked up to a single das, backplane, or whatever.https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee6197...
Kraszmyl - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
Dur forgot to mention the dual port part and no edit. Its a single physical port not like there are two independent sets of jacks...well kinda I mean there are I guess but not like two usb ports vs one usb port.http://www.scsita.org/serial-storage-wire/2007/07/...
bill.rookard - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
If that 60TB Seagate SSD comes in at less than $40,000 each, I'd be surprised. I wonder what the raw NAND size is for the overprovisioning? It would be amusing if the amount of overprovisioning NAND is higher than what we can get as a full consumer drive (4TB overprovision probably?)