Seagate Announces BarraCuda Consumer SATA SSD
by Billy Tallis on July 3, 2018 5:15 PM EST
Seagate has pretty much always been a major player in the storage market, where they're known primarily for their hard drives. They haven't been completely absent from the SSD market, but they have focused almost exclusively on the enterprise SSD market. It has been quite a while since we've seen a consumer-oriented SSD from Seagate, but the new BarraCuda SATA SSD brings them back into play.
The BarraCuda SSD comes with minimal technical specs, but what we have so far points to a mainstream SATA drive that probably uses current-generation 64L 3D TLC NAND flash memory and a controller with the usual DRAM cache. The internals may offer a hint as to Seagate's plans for the consumer SSD market: if the BarraCuda is just a Silicon Motion reference design, then Seagate may not be very serious about competing in this market segment. If they've written their own firmware for a Silicon Motion or Marvell controller, then the BarraCuda is more likely to be an interesting competitor and less likely to be another one-off product.
| Seagate BarraCuda SSD Specifications | ||||
| Capacity | 250 GB | 500 GB | 1 TB | 2 TB |
| Model Number | STGS250401 | STGS500401 | STGS1000401 | STGS2000401 |
| Controller | unspecified | |||
| NAND Flash | Toshiba 64-layer 3D TLC NAND | |||
| Form-Factor, Interface | 6 Gbps SATA, 2.5" | |||
| Sequential Read | up to 540 MB/s | |||
| Sequential Write | up to 520 MB/s | |||
| Random Read IOPS | up to 90k IOPS | |||
| Random Write IOPS | unspecified | |||
| DRAM Buffer | unspecified | |||
| Warranty | 5 years | |||
| MTBF | 1.8M hours | |||
| Write Endurance | unspecified | 1092 TB 0.3 DWPD |
||
| Price | $74.99 (30¢/GB) | $119.99 (24¢/GB) | $229.99 (23¢/GB) | TBA |
Pricing appears to be only slightly higher than competitors like the Crucial MX500 or WD Blue, which is to be expected since Seagate doesn't have the benefit of manufacturing their own flash memory (though they are now a minority shareholder of Toshiba Memory). The five year warranty and 0.3 DWPD endurance rating are standard for mainstream consumer SATA SSDs.
Seagate is planning a limited release through Amazon Prime this month, followed by broad availability in September.
Source: Seagate
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cacnoff - Wednesday, July 4, 2018 - link
You would be very wrong if you think a 2TB SSD is only $50 cost to the company making them. NAND and DRAM are very tightly constrained supply and demand based markets. If you aren't a primary NAND or DRAM maker you are going to pay market price, and Seagate is not a primary.milkod2001 - Wednesday, July 4, 2018 - link
If they order 100 000 or much more units they will build it under $50 at total cost easily.Reflex - Wednesday, July 4, 2018 - link
[citation needed]milkod2001 - Thursday, July 5, 2018 - link
Obviously this is information not revealed to public. Just my educated guess. There is no much special materials in SSD especially m2 SSD types. Whatever they sell at $200 retail price they must make it at $50 a pop max if they are mass produced in super large quantities.Gigaplex - Thursday, July 5, 2018 - link
If it was that easy, the other brands would be lowering their price to undercut Samsung significantly. That's not happening.milkod2001 - Friday, July 6, 2018 - link
Yes, it is that easy. Other brands have to lower prices to compete with Samsung. Lets say Samsung sells SSD at $200, other weak brand have to sell it for $189 if want to compete and survive.The real difference is that Samsung makes many parts itself, so production cost is much lower, it is not dependant on suppliers, no delays etc. Small brands pay more to produce anything and are getting less when selling in order to compete.
gglaw - Thursday, July 12, 2018 - link
there is absolutely 0 chance a 2TB SSD with modern 3D NAND and controller being produced at $50 - this is just flat out 100% wrong. There are countless companies including dozens that sell straight from Taiwan and China under names 99% of ppl have never heard of that cannot come even CLOSE to these price points. There would be at least 1 out of the 50+ models out that would try to flood the market and just take tiny margins but get huge volumes selling under a quarter of what other companies do. No way to say it other than, wrong wrong wrong. Samsung producing everything in house has economic advantages but they also cannot sell these for $50. The price premium huge companies buying in lots ot 100k is not far from production costs. The companies buying Toshiba NAND, Phison full packaged designs, and Micron NAND in huge quantities are not getting out signicantly cheaper products.This is not the diamond conspiracy where the supply is
gglaw - Thursday, July 12, 2018 - link
oops finger slipped on post key lol, but the diamond conspiracy with apparent gigantic excess of resources falsely limited to maintin insane markups is not true for DRAM or NAND production. So the claim that any company with access to internal vertical production model or able to buy mass quantities at discount being able to sell SSD's at a quarter of the current prices has absolutely no evidence.leexgx - Wednesday, July 4, 2018 - link
Can you please stop playing audio blip when I goto pages on this site (might be an advert) as it keeps on hogging my Bluetooth connection witch blocks audio from my other phone until I turn blue off and on (duel connected headset)GilmourD - Sunday, July 8, 2018 - link
Are you using Internet Explorer? I don't here a blip in Chrome.