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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nathanddrews - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
By the time the capacities I want are affordable, I won't have enough PCIe bandwidth to utilize it all. I'll have to buy a dual Xeon platform just to use two drives.(slight exaggeration)
ddriver - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
Anything over 500 MB/s is largely useless in consumer and even most prosumer scenarios. I assume you are not an enterprise user, since you white about "having to buy xeon"...Any word on warranty? Just the other day I saw a box of HP branded SAS seagate hdds - enterprise product at enterprise price.... with pathetic 12 months warranty... WTG...
WinterCharm - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
No it's not. PCIE SSD's make a big difference.ddriver - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
Care to provide empirical proof of that statement?mdw9604 - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
Have you seen 4K p0rn? Those bits don't carry themselves to my screenwyewye - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
Baf example. Even the highest UHD Bluray movies have a bandwidth than can easily be handled by a dumb mecanical HDD.Blamcore - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
Maybe u just don't have enough 4k screens surrounding you, simultaneously playing different genres of p0rn to feel the impact of slow drives...mdw9604 - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
LOL. Inovation in PCIe SSD as was /w Beta will be p0rn. Streaming VR in 16K will require 16 bus lanes :)Smókes - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
If you want speed? If a 15 second boot time isn't fast enough? Lamboghinis is not a consumer car either. But people still buy it. At this moment this is top shelf ssd's. I doubt most people will be able to afford it. But if i could i would buy one just to have it. Even with a PCI-e SSD i still get loading screens and it still takes 8 seconds to boot my pc. What if i could boot in 1 second? Who wouldn't want that.ddriver - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
If you think its about "booting time" you are completely clueless.First of all, most professionals rarely shut down their system, my system has not booted for like a month, I could not care less about booting time. I have zero booting time, because I don't boot, it is that easy. Besides, most of the boot time is actually due to the bios, bootloaders and such, and faster storage will do nothing for those times.
Secondly, as tests have shown, booting from from a 2 GB/s PCIe NVME is barely any faster than booting from a 500 MB/s SSD, even though the NVME is 400% faster, booting time is only 2% faster. Make the storage even faster and the benefits are diminished even further, because at this point storage is no longer a bottleneck, even if you have a gazillion GB/s it won't make a difference.
HDDs were largely the slowest component in the system and the system is only as fast as its slowest component, however, even a regular SATA SSD is enough to alleviate it, and even if new NVME drives are 4-5 times faster in synthetic tests that isolate only the storage component, there is barely any difference in actual real world software. Not consumer software, not even prosumer software, in fact prosumer software is usually far more bottlenecked by CPU performance, so regardless of how fast your storage is, you will have to wait on the CPU to process the data.
Such fast SSDs are not meant for consumers and they will never be, you may buy one if you have money to waste, but it will do you no good and it will be money stupidly spent. Those are products for database servers, they are far better at random iops, and even though the immense bandwidth for sequential access doesn't really have a use in that scenario, it is actually beneficial when you add new or replace existing storage, where the fast sequential performance will allow to populate that volume in a very short time so it can enter service faster.