Seagate Introduces New Nytro PCIe SSDs: XP6500 & XF/XM1440

After acquiring SSD controller designer SandForce, LSI took the quick route towards creating high-performance PCIe SSDs by putting multiple SandForce controllers and an LSI RAID controller on a single expansion card, branding the resulting product as the Nytro. This Nytro product line was transferred to Seagate along with the SandForce division in May 2014, and it’s now getting both a refresh and a major expansion.

The new Nytro XP6500 succeeds the Nytro XP6302 and offers improved write latency and improved write endurance. Write throughput suffers slightly, but the XP6302’s original performance specifications were inflated by testing at 28% over-provisioning rather than the default of 17% that is implied by the listed capacities. Meanwhile the XP6500 4TB model is listed as optimized for 8kB rather than 4kB random accesses, so its IOPS numbers aren’t directly comparable to the others.

Peak power consumption isn’t listed but is likely significantly increased over the XP6302’s 39W, based on the increase in required airflow from 300LFM to 550LFM for the same operating temperature range. The Nytro XP6500 supports a supercapacitor bank to protect data in its large (2-4GB) DRAM cache. The XP6500 is available either as a full-height expansion card with built-in supercapacitors, or as a half-height card with an optional tethered supercapacitor module. Seagate has announced immediate availability of the Nytro XP6500.

Expanding the Nytro brand into new territory are the XF1440 and XM1440 NVMe drives, in 2.5″ U.2 (SFF-8639) and M.2 22110 form factors respectively. They’re split in to two tiers: “Endurance Optimized” (3 drive writes per day) and “Capacity Optimized” (0.3 DWPD).

Performance specifications for the Nytro XM1440 weren’t available, and we aren’t assuming that they will be the same as for the Nytro XF1440. The XF is listed as using eMLC (Enterprise MLC) but the XM is using MLC+, a term often used to refer to higher-binned consumer-grade MLC. Maximum power consumption is significantly lower for the XM, and the XM will be released later (early 2016, when the XF1440 will ship at the end of October), which suggests that there may also be controller differences.

Toshiba Announces Three New NVMe SSD Families

On the eve of Flash Memory Summit (August 11-13), Toshiba has announced a full range of NVMe-based PCIe SSDs using Toshiba controllers and Toshiba MLC flash.

For the enterprise market, the PX04P series complements the SAS-based PX04S drives announced last week. The PX04P is available as a 2.5” drive with a U.2 (SFF-8639) connector, or as a PCIe expansion card. In either case, the drive supports four lanes of PCIe 3.0 and can make good use of that bandwidth to offer up to 3.1 GB/s sequential read speeds. With an endurance rating of 10 drive writes per day it is intended for relatively write-heavy workloads.

For the high-performance client market, the XG3 is available in the M.2 2280 form factor using four lanes of PCIe 3.1, or as a 2.5” drive using the two-lane SATA Express connector. If these drives make it in to the retail channel, it means that consumers whose motherboards have a SATA Express connector but no M.2 slot will finally have an easy way to get in on the PCIe storage revolution.

For tablets and ultra-thin laptops, the BG1 is optimized for low power in very small packages. It comes as either an M.2 2230 card or a soldered-down module measuring 16mm by 20mm. The BG1’s maximum capacity is only 256 GB, and given the power and size constraints it is probably not using a 4-lane PCIe connection.

The two client drive families implement support for the Trusted Computing Group Pyrite standard, a subset of TCG Opal that includes features necessary for things like secure boot but does not include encryption.

Seagate and Micron Announce 1200.2, S600DC SAS SSD Families for Enterprise

Today Seagate and Micron are jointly announcing their latest generation of Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) MLC SSDs for enterprise use. The new families of drives are designed to significantly broaden the Enterprise SSD lineup of both companies with a wider range of capacities, features, and performance options, for with up to 36 new drive models altogether.

Making today’s announcement particularly different (and wordy) is the fact that both companies are announcing the same drives under their own brands. Developed in a joint partnership between the two companies, Seagate and Micron have developed a single line of drives to be sold under different brands by each manufacturer for the purpose of making the drives available from multiple vendors for second-sourcing needs. For Seagate these drives will be known as the 1200.2 series, and will total 36 drives altogether. Meanwhile for Micron these drives will be known as the S600DC series.

We’ll start things off with Seagate, who has released the most information on these new drives. In Seagate’s 1200.2 lineup the drives are available in four different tiers that trade cost against the higher endurance and performance, enabled through greater over-provisioning. The “High Endurance” line (rated for 25 drive writes per day) is tuned for write-intensive workloads and lots of random I/O. The “Mainstream Endurance” line (10 DWPD) is intended for a workload with a 70/30 mix of reads and writes, while the “Light Endurance” (3 DWPD) and “Scalable Endurance” (1 DWPD) are for very heavily read-intensive workloads with mostly sequential I/O.

Capacity options vary between the different tiers: the HE drives are available in only two smaller sizes (200GB and 400GB), the SE drives in two large sizes (1920GB and 3840GB), and the middle two tiers offer more choices between those extremes. As is often the case, the smallest drives in each tier have somewhat lower performance ratings, which causes the 200GB HE drive to be rated a bit slower than the three largest ME drives. All models are using the same platform – that is the same controller and NAND – and Seagate isn’t binning the Micron MLC flash chips between tiers, so all of the performance differences stem from the differences in firmware configuration and the amount of over-provisioning.

All drives use a dual-channel 12Gbps SAS connection, and these are the first 12Gbps drives that can use the two channels in tandem for higher performance rather than fault tolerance. This enables peak sequential read speeds of 1700 MB/s to 1800 MB/s, compared to the single-channel limit of 1200 MB/s. Peak 4kB random read speeds are also great looking, ranging from 140,000 IOPS to 210,000 IOPS. Advertised write speeds are nothing special, but the SAS interface does allow almost all of the drives to exceed the capabilities of 6Gbps SATA for sequential writes.

Rounding out the enterprise feature set, every drive is available in a self-encrypting model, and the ME models are also offered in variants with FIPS 140-2 validated encryption. The drives have full power-loss protection and a 5 year warranty. All models use the 2.5” form factor. Drives under 1TB are 7mm thick while the larger models are 15mm thick.

Meanwhile for the Micron S600DC branded release of these drives, we don’t have quite as much information for today’s announcement. We know that Micron will be releasing three different models of the drive as the S610DC, the S630DC, and the S650DC. However we don’t know which models are the higher endurance models and which are the higher capacity models.

Overall, the fact that Seagate and Micron are entering into a second-sourcing partnership on SSDs here is an interesting one, and one that makes a lot of sense given the desire for multiple sources from enterprise customers. And to be clear, this is true second-sourcing for as much as Seagate and Micron can achieve it, making it more than just both companies selling the drives under their own brands. In order to ensure a second-source supply, the two companies are using second-sourcing wherever practical in their supply chain and have geographically-diverse stockpiles for the important components that are only available from a single source, so they are confident they can offer a reliable ongoing supply.

Finally, we’re told that the drives will be on display this month, with Seagate planning on publicly demonstrating the 1200.2 SSD next week at Flash Memory Summit. As for availability, Seagate tells us that the 1200.2 series will be shipping to channel partners starting this month.