Seagate announced its Pulsar SSD line on December 7 or 8 (depending on which version of the press release Google finds for you), allowing a show to drop that people had expected for more than a year. Pulsar drives use the familiar 2.5-inch HDD form factor and a SATA interface, making it easy to drop the drives into existing computer and server systems. Seagate’s Pulsar SSDs employ SLC (single-level cell) NAND Flash devices, which cost more per bit than MLC (multi-level cell) and TLC (three-level cell) NAND Flash devices. In exchange for the higher cost, you get more reliable memory, as was discussed in this blog a while back. (Check out “More than Moore: SLC, MLC, and TLC NAND Flash.”)

Seagate Pulsar SSD

The use of SLC NAND Flash underscores Seagate’s focus on enterprise-class storage for the SSD. There are at least two good reasons for Seagate’s enterprise focus. First, enterprise customers are more able to translate an SSD’s speed advantage over HDDs into dollars (as previously discussed in the blog entry “SSD TCO (Total Cost of Ownership”). Second, SSDs are a premium product with a premium price. Enterprise customers more easily accept the higher cost/Gbyte price tag attached to SSDs. Seagate’s Pulsar SSDs are available in storage capacities to 200 Gbytes and the SSDs achieve “a peak performance of up to 30,000 read IOPS and 25,000 write IOPS, 240MB/s sequential read and 200 MB/s sequential write” according to Seagate’s press release. The Pulsar drives have a 5-year limited warranty.

Micron Technology rolled out its RealSSD C300 less than a week before Seagate’s SSD announcement. The first glaringly obvious difference in Micron’s C300 SSD is that it sports a 6-Gbyte/sec SATA 6.0 interface. However, the faster interface alone will not boost performance (discussed earlier in this blog here) if the drive internals aren’t designed to sustain high transfer rates supported by SATA 6.0. To that end, Micron’s RealSSD C300 press release discloses the fact that the new Micron SSD “leverages a finely tuned architecture and high-speed ONFI 2.1 NAND Flash  to provide a whole new level of performance.” (ONFi, the Open NAND Flash interface, is discussed in this previous blog entry.) The result: a read throughput speed of up to 355MB/s and a write throughput speed of up to 215MB/s.

Compare those numbers to Seagate’s Pulsar and you’ll see that the Micron drive’s read throughput is nearly 50% faster but the write throughput is only 7.5% faster. Write throughput is one of the Achilles’ heels of SSDs. NAND Flash devices had an erase/write cycle that simply takes time.

Micron RealSSD C300

Micron’s C300 SSDs will be offered in 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch form factors, with both form factors supporting 128- and 256-Gbyte capacities. Micron is currently sampling the C300 SSD in limited quantities and expects to enter production in the first quarter of calendar 2010.

Both companies are making smart moves into the SSD market. Seagate, like Western Digital and its acquisition of SSD vendor SiliconSystems in March of this year, recognizes that it’s not in the HDD business—it’s in the storage business and SSD storage is hot right now. Micron, like Intel, sees SSDs as a value-added way to package and market it’s NAND Flash devices. Both companies have made very smart moves into the SSD market.

This first image from the article compares the observed average read performance from a Seagate XT SATA 6G HDD, a Seagate Barracuda SATA II HDD, and one of Intel’s X25 solid-state drives (SSD). The benchmark being used here is Simpli Software’s HDTach.

You can see that the SATA 6G drive is about 6 to 7% faster on the benchmark than the 3-Gbits/sec SATA II drive. That’s a far cry from twice as fast, strongly suggesting that the HDD interface is not the limiting factor for HDD performance, at least not in this situation. However, take a look at the performance of the Intel X25 SSD, with a SATA II interface. Its average read bandwidth is about 70% better than the Seagate SATA II HDD and 60% better than the Seagate SATA 6G HDD.

Now the impetus for this PC Perspective article was the receipt of a very unusual SSD from Marvell. Marvell is a semiconductor vendor. Unlike Intel, Marvell doesn’t make SSDs; it makes SSD controller chips and this Marvell SSD, which contains a Marvell SATA 6G SSD controller chip, is an engineering sample designed to help system developers evaluate SATA 6G for their systems.

According to the article, this Marvell SSD isn’t built with NAND Flash devices. It’s built with ROM devices. So you can read from it but cannot write to it. It’s a read-only SSD, which is not particularly practical if you’re building computer systems but this drive makes a good enough tool if you simply need to exercise or evaluate SATA 6G interfaces.

So how does the Marvell SATA 6G SSD fare? Here’s the graph from the PC Perspective article:

The Marvell read-only SATA 6G SSD attains a burst-read rate of just over 350 Mbytes/sec while the Intel X25 SATA II drive attains a burst-read rate of just over 260 Mbytes/sec. So the burst-read rate for the Marvell SSD is about 1/3 faster than for the Intel X25 SSD. Unfortunately, because the Marvell SSD is a read-only device, PC Perspective could not compare burst-write rates, which tend to be significantly slower for SSDs. Consequently, you might expect that the SATA 6G interface won’t be so helpful for write transations.

What to conclude?

Well, first of all, PC Perspective comments that the Intel SSD appears to be close to saturating the SATA II interface, which speaks well of the Intel X25 SSD’s internal architecture. Next the results indicate that SSDs will disproportionately benefit from the faster SATA 6G interface than will HDDs. Finally, it suggests that future SSDs designed for the faster SATA 6G interface standard will need to employ more than the 10 NAND channels employed in the Intel X25 SSD to boost the internal bandwidth of the SSD architecture.