Seagate have finally joined the SSD segment with their first solid-state drive. The Seagate “Pulsar” packs up to 200GB of SLC flash memory into a 2.5-inch enclosure, and the company are claiming 240MB/s sequential read and 200 MB/s sequential write speeds.
The Pulsar has a SATA interface and Seagate have squeezed in some power loss protection so that, even if your system loses power, you’ll hopefully not lose everything you were working on. They’re also quoting a 0.44 percent AFR (average failure rate).
Seagate have been quietly sampling the Pulsar to OEMs since October 2009, but there’s no word on when you’ll actually be able to buy machines with the drive installed (nor separately as standalone storage). Also unannounced is pricing.If you go with the pricing then it would be damn costly some where around 700$.Though SSD seems like the future of data storage, the still have some major drawbacks that makes their purchase a risk.
The primary being their degradation over time is, writing more data into the blocks. After a few uses the blocks will become almost unwritable and have terrible performance. They also have much more less space, 200GB for this instance, is nowhere near enough to satisfy the consumer market that most likely know about SSD’s (gamers, programmers, multimedia freaks and other heavy-pc users).
The “SSD market is now primed and well-positioned for growth from both a revenue and unit perspective.” Unsworth stated that Gartner estimates sales of SSD hardware to reach $1 billion in 2010.
Most important advantage over the classic HDD is the seek time is in under a millisecond and the sheer massive random read and write speed that no RAID’ed or 15K HDD’s would be able to reach! A velociraptor would do about 1.5 MB/s random writes and under 1MB/s random reads, but an SSD like the one Intel pushes, the X25-M does 50 MB/s random reads and 20 to 30 MB/s random writes!
So if you are buying this then just use these for OS and installed apps and you can’t go wrong. They don’t fail after a few writes either, nor do they suffer performance loss. Maybe the earlier models had issues but these have been sorted now. They run nice and cool. Many of the problems with normal HDD’s is because of heat issues. If you keep your case nice and cool, the hard drives (like every other component) will fair a lot better.Try the OCZ or OCZ Turbo series of SSD for awesome performance and decent price, as far as SSD’s go anyway.
SSD will continue to develop and most probably most of their issues will be resolved in time, but for now this may be not the best way to go if you want a faster drive.So what do you feel about it.
