Seagate Re-Enters Enterprise SATA SSD Market with Nytro XF1230

It’s hard for any new SATA SSD to be big news. Aside from instances where new NAND flash enables higher capacities or a big price drop, almost everything we see is an incremental improvement where performance in particular doesn’t increase much from one generation to the next. The new Seagate Nytro XF1230 enterprise SATA SSD is notable not for its technical specifications, but for who’s selling it. Seagate has been absent from the SATA SSD market for quite a while since the 600 and 600 Pro SSDs were discontinued, but now they’re getting back in the game.

The Seagate Nytro XF1230 is intended for use with read-intensive workloads but its use of eMLC NAND flash also gives it decent write performance and endurance. Seagate isn’t disclosing who their partners are for the NAND or the SSD controller, but the combination of Micron NAND and Marvell controllers has been working well for Seagate lately in the PCIe space.

The drive writes per day ratings are about twice the usual for read-oriented SSDs, which broadens its scope of appeal slightly. The steady-state random write performance is not record-breaking but is reasonable for this kind of product. As with virtually all enterprise SSDs, the XF1230 includes full power loss protection, but encryption support is not advertised.

The Seagate Nytro XF1230 is in mass production now and is sampling to Seagate partners.

Toshiba Announces New BGA SSDs Using 3D TLC NAND

Toshiba has announced a new generation of BG series single-chip SSDs, with a newer controller and expanded capacity options thanks to the adoption of 3D NAND. The BG series is Toshiba’s SSD solution for tablets and ultrabooks that need a smaller form factor than a M.2 2280 module but higher performance and capacity than eMMC solutions.

Toshiba’s BG1 series was first previewed at CES 2015. That first generation uses a PCIe 2 x2 link and implements the NVMe 1.1a protocol. The BG1 is available in capacities of 128GB and 256GB either as a 16mm by 20mm BGA package integrating both the SSD controller and NAND flash, or as M.2 2230 removable modules.

The new BG series switches from planar MLC NAND to Toshiba’s BiCS 3D TLC NAND. The higher per-die capacity allows for the addition of a 512GB model and makes the package slightly thinner. The new SSD controller has been upgraded to operate at PCIe 3 speeds though still with only two lanes. It also now supports NVMe 1.2 including the optional Host Memory Buffer (HMB) feature. We’ve previously seen HMB implemented by a Marvell controller that also targets low-end NVMe applications.

Toshiba has shared some details about how they plan to make use of HMB and what its impact on performance will be. The BG series uses a DRAM-less SSD controller architecture, but HMB allows the controller to make use of some of the host system’s DRAM. The BG series will use host memory to implement a read cache of the drive’s NAND mapping tables. This is expected to primarily benefit random access speeds, where a DRAM-less controller would otherwise have to constantly fetch data from flash in order to determine where to direct pending read and write operations. Looking up some of the NAND mapping information from the buffer in the host’s DRAM—even with the added latency of fetching it over PCIe—is quicker than performing an extra read from the flash.

Toshiba hasn’t provided full performance specs for the new BG series SSDs, but they did supply some benchmark data illustrating the benefit of using HMB. Using only 37MB of host DRAM and testing access speed to a 16GB portion of the SSD, Toshiba measured improvement ranging from 30% for QD1 random reads up to 115% improvement for QD32 random writes.

While it looks like HMB can do a lot to alleviate the worst performance problems of DRAM-less SSD controllers, the caveat is that it requires support from the operating system’s NVMe driver. HMB is still an obscure optional feature of NVMe and is not yet supported out of the box by any major operating system, and Toshiba isn’t currently planning to provide their own NVMe drivers for OEMs to bundle with systems using BG series SSDs. Thus, it is likely that the first generation of systems that adopt the new BG series SSDs will not be able to take full advantage of their capabilities.

Carried over from the previous BG1 series are support for TCG Pyrite and the option of full TCG Opal encryption support. The 16mm by 20mm BGA package is still only 1 gram for the highest capacity, and the maximum thickness is reduced from 1.65mm to 1.60mm. Power consumption may have increased slightly, with the new BG series SSDs drawing up to 2.8W when active compared to a specification of 2.2W typical for the BG1.

The new BG series SSDs are currently sampling to select OEMs, and will be in full mass production by the end of the year.

Seagate Expands Nytro Enterprise SSD Family with 2TB M.2 XM1440

As Flash Memory Summit 2016 approaches, many major players in the SSD market are starting to announce new products. A year after introducing the Nytro XM1440 enterprise M.2 PCIe SSD, Seagate is expanding the lineup with a 2TB option. The XM1440 M.2 and XF1440 2.5″ U.2 SSDs are based on the combination of Marvell’s 88SS1093 PCIe 3.0 NVMe controller and Micron MLC NAND. The products are a result of a collaboration between Micron and Seagate, and are sold by Micron as the 7100 series. The 2.5″ version has had a 2TB-class capacity option from the start, but the new XM1440 2TB is the first of its kind. The higher drive capacity is achieved through denser NAND packaging rather than from switching to higher-capacity 3D NAND dies.

The XM1440 and XF1440 are available in either a capacity-optimized configuration intended for read-intensive workloads and rated for 0.3 drive writes per day, or in an endurance-optimized configuration for mixed workloads and rated for 3 drive writes per day. The latter sacrifices some usable capacity for increased overprovisioning and higher random write speeds, but otherwise they are the same drive. The 2TB XM1440 M.2 will unsurprisingly be one of the capacity-optimized variants, with similar specifications to the 1920GB XF1440 2.5″ U.2 SSD.

Seagate is also introducing a PCIe add-in card counterpart to the XM1440 and XF1440 as the Nytro XP7102. Based on the same controller and NAND, the XP7102’s model number appears to mark it as the entry-level option in a new XP7000 generation to replace the XP6000 series products that were multi-controller solutions with an on-board RAID controller. The Nytro XP7102 targets only the endurance-optimized mixed workload segment with 800GB and 1600GB as the only two capacity options, and has similar specifications to its XF1440 equivalents.

The 2TB XM1440 M.2 will be available in November 2016 and the Nytro XP7102 PCIe add-in card is already available.