Seagate has demonstrated the world's "fastest ever SSD", claims a press release from the storage technology firm. A 16-lane PCIe SSD provided a data transfer performance of 10 gigabytes per second (GB/s), which is claimed to be 4GB/s faster than its nearest competitor. The drives are said to be "production ready" and this 16-lane drive, and an 8-lane version, will be made generally available to customers this summer.
Brett Pemble, Seagate's general manager and vice president of SSD Products, talked up the benefits of high speed data storage, "Your data is only as good as how easily you can access it and put it to use," he said. "Seagate is committed to providing the full spectrum of technologies to help meet the diverse needs of organizations so they can unlock this value. Whether for consumer cloud or business applications, this SSD will help improve on demands for fast access to information, where split seconds drive incremental value gains".
This early test unit PCIe SSD is built to Open Compute Project (OCP) specifications so would be a good fit for data centres, such as those used by Facebook. OCP storage specs promote reduced power consumption and help keep the costs of ownership low. Seagate says that its new PCIe SSDs will work with any system that supports the Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) protocol.
As mentioned in the intro, Seagate is developing an 8-lane version of this PCIe SSD. While this unit doesn't grab today's headline it will still deliver an "industry-leading throughput of 6.7GB/s," according to Seagate's own testing. The 8-lane solution will be cheaper and even thriftier with power consumption.
Seagate's new SSDs are currently being tested by its large corporate customers and will be on display at the Open Compute Project Summit 2016 in San Jose, California, later today, and tomorrow.
