Seagate Pulsar: the first enterprise-ready SSD

PulsarIt’s official!  Seagate’s new SSD is called Pulsar, and is shipping to enterprise OEMs.  Pulsar is targeted at the enterprise blade server and general server market. 

Pulsar is the first truly enterprise-ready SSD from the world’s leader in enterprise storage devices.

The specs you might expect:

  • Up to 200 Gigabytes
  • SLC technology
  • 3 Gb/s SATA interface
  • Improved IOPS per Watt (vs. hard drives)
  • 2.5″ form factor with 7mm height

These make a lot of sense given the needs of today’s enterprise server market – 3Gb/s SATA, 2.5″, etc.  The 7mm height provides some great density opportunites for blade server manufacturers in particular. 

It is the first of many SSD strorage devices from Seagate.

The specs that make Pulsar uniquely enterprise-ready:

  • Stable data rate performance across the device’s multi-year useful life
  • Power Loss Protection – logic to protect data in volatile buffers long enough to write to non-volatile memory at power loss
  • Balanced perfomance between reads and writes
  • 0.44% Annual Failure Rate (AFR) in enterprise applications
  • 5 year warranty

SSD is not just flash media.  Extensive pre- and post-sales support is needed for true enterprise drives. Pulsar’s enterprise-ready capabilities come from Seagate storage device IP applied to solid state media and validated with extensive testing that enterprise customers require. 

For example, Power Loss Protection – achieved by the integration of a super-capacitor in Pulsar’s data architecture – protects enerprise data, enabling customers to use Pulsar with the write cache enabled. 

“Where’s Seagate?”

Some in the industry have been asking “Where’s Seagate?” as other companies have launched SSD products into the enterprise market over the past year or so. 

The answer is “In the lab and meeting with customers, building a true enterprise SSD.”

2009-12-08T06:02:07+00:00

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17 Comments

  1. pesos December 8, 2009 at 10:38 am - Reply

    When will these be available to end users?

    • Pete Steege December 8, 2009 at 11:06 am - Reply

      Pulsar is shipping exclusively to OEMs at this point.

    • Pete Steege December 8, 2009 at 11:07 am - Reply

      No date for end user availability to share with you at this time.

  2. soway December 8, 2009 at 7:47 pm - Reply

    It’s really a good news! If the price is more lower than SPEC SSD.SPEC life will be not so good.

    The main featuer is Power Loss Protection.How this be done?By a big capacitor?

    • Pete Steege December 10, 2009 at 8:40 am - Reply

      Yes, Power Loss Protection is via a capacitor.

  3. […] Storage Effect blog […]

  4. David Szabados December 10, 2009 at 12:25 pm - Reply

    Nice story Pete. Looks like Pulsar is well-timed in the market according to many industry analysts quoted in the press. That’s good news for Seagate as enterprise SSD adoption is just now beginning to take off in a big way.

  5. Joe January 17, 2010 at 3:24 am - Reply

    When can we expect an FDE version? There’s a huge market of laptop users who want both SSD and hardware FDE and currently have to choose between the two.

    • Pete Steege January 19, 2010 at 8:27 am - Reply

      Pulsar is an enterprise technology and will used in servers, not notebooks.

  6. rickster January 18, 2010 at 8:33 pm - Reply

    Well, I guess now that Seagate started building (enterprise-level)SSD’s it’ll soon be over for the (mechanical)HD.
    that “big capacitor” better be reliable though, or seagate will lose big time. 🙂
    yup, picture a couple hundred of these in a NetAPP GX indexing in real-time, ZFS – a very “quiet” wow !.
    For the home Joe like me, it’ll defintely be atleast 3 to 4 years more before SSD size and price will become “on par” with our present HD prices though…
    So, unless you want to buy one of these instead 2 brand new laptops just wait a while longer.

    • Pete Steege January 19, 2010 at 8:26 am - Reply

      Reliability is a key requirement for which Seagate is taking full account. No doubt there will be a long transition time for this new technology to be widely adopted.

  7. Ben March 2, 2010 at 7:20 am - Reply

    Who are the OEM’s that are integrating these drives? HP, IBM, DELL?

  8. Mark Wojtasiak March 2, 2010 at 9:41 am - Reply

    Hi Ben. I am not at liberty say what specific OEMs are taking Pulsar today, but Seagate does work very closely with all of the OEMs on new product introductions. LSI is one OEM partner currently working with Pulsar on their SSD based PCIe controller. Check it out: http://www.lsi.com/news/product_news/2010/2010_01_26.html

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  11. Donald October 7, 2010 at 7:23 pm - Reply

    What will be the cost of these drives?

    • Mark Wojtasiak October 8, 2010 at 7:28 am - Reply

      @Donald Good question…Pulsar is currently a product available to OEMs. We do not have prices established for the masses, but that is sure to come in the coming quarters.

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