Even though they are one of the Big 2 HDD manufacturers, Seagate has not neglected the growing importance of NAND and flash storage. Starting off with their Seagate 600 series of SSDs, the company has focused on bringing their brand to the enterprise flash storage segment. In line with that, Seagate has just revealed what is most likely the fastest SSD made yet. With up to 10GBps of throughput, the new Nytro SSDs will be fastest yet.
Using the NVMe storage protocol, the top model uses PCIe 3.0 x16 for peak performance. This gives the drive 15.75GBps of bandwidth though peak performance is limited to 10Gbps. This is well beyond what other NVMe SSDs, even those utilizing PCIe 3.0 use. In fact, the Nytro will likely be twice as fast as it’s competitors, most of whom can’t even saturate PCIe 3.0 x4, let alone PCIe 3.0 x8.
For the more power and price sensitive customers, Seagate will be introducing a toned down version using PCIe 3.0 x8, with 7.88GBps of bandwidth and 6.7Gbps of peak sequential throughput. Despite being the second tier of performance, this model should still give most of Seagate’s competitors a run for their money, with few drives being capable of even theoretically matching it.
For now, there is no word on pricing but given the performance and enterprise segment, expect a hefty price tag. There is no word yet on the controller or NAND used nor random performance, a more important metric for SSDs than sequential performance.
