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Seagate's BUMPER State of the Storage Nation announcement

Wannabe 'digital data steward' speaks to the masses

Server flash cards

There is one new Nytro flash card, courtesy of the LSI technology acquisition from Avaygo. It is the XP6302 has up to 2TB raw capacity (1.75TB usable) in a half-height: half length PCIe 3.0 8-lance card. Its read/write random IOPS are 295,000/79,000 and its average latency is less than 200 microsecs. We understand its endurance is greater than 3PB written.

Seagate says the the XP6209, storing up to 930GB of usable data, and the XP6210, storing up to 1.8TB usable, are both in its Nytro product line. LSI announced these in November 2013.

Seagate_Nytro_XP_PCIe_flash_cards

NVMe SSD controller

The OneStor XP is, Seagate claims, the storage industry’s first dual-controller Non-volatile Memory Express (NVMe) Solid State Disk (SSD) storage system. It uses Intel’s latest Intel Xeon E5 v3 processor, and is a 2U, 24-slot box into which SSDs can be loaded.

Seagate mentions sequential read and random read performance of more than 20GB/sec through a single controller connected to half the lanes (x2 PCIe) of the SSDs. There’s more information available here.

Final Comment

Seagate has a clear lead in hybrid drives but, in the 3.5-inch product space HGST has a 2TB/disk advantage with its helium-filled drive technology.

If HGST starts building helium-filled 2.5-inch drives then we would expect it to have an about 1TB/disk capacity advantage. We think, in these days of bulk data disk storage needs this is a profound technology advantage.

There's no technical barrier that we can see to stop HGST extending helium-fill technology throughout its disk drive range and matching Seagate for performance while crucifying it on capacity.

We believe Seagate engineers are working furiously to develop Seagate's own helium-filled drive type technology. Ditto Toshiba engineers.

Curiously, or not, there were no Kinetic drive announcements.

Availability

The LaCie d2 Thunderbolt 2 will be available this month through Apple and LaCie in 3 TB ($299.00), 4 TB ($399.00) and 6 TB ($499.00) capacities. The 128GB d2 SSD Upgrade ($299.00) will be available in October. The USB 3.0-only versions will be available in October. ®

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