SLC-based Seagate Pulsar
Seagate has finally joined the SSD club and unveiled the Pulsar, an SLC-based enterprise class drive.
The Pulsar is a 2.5-inch drive, it's 7mm thick and it will ship in three capacities ranging from 50GB, through 100GB to 200GB. While most SSD makers opt for 40GB and 160GB drives, Samsung took the road less traveled and added a few more chips in the mix. The drives are based on Samsung's chips and their capacity is, in fact, somewhat higher, but Samsung reserved 20 percent of it for redundancy.
As the Pulsar series is targeted at business users, reliability is paramount, hence the redundant chips and the choice of SLC instead of MLC. However, the drives don't feature a lifetime warranty, just a 5-year one.
Samsung stuck to SATA II on the Pulsar, but once demand for SATA 3.0 picks up, it will probably add support for the new standard. All three drives offer 240MB/s read speed, and up to 200MB/s sequential write, but sustained write speeds differ depending on the size.
We're not expecting the Pulsar to come cheap. After all, it's targeted at the enterprise market, but hopefully Seagate will soon come up with consumer oriented products as well. In any case, we're glad to see a major play enter the market, as stronger competition means lower prices.
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