Seagate Pulsar 2™ Solid State Drives Review

• Seagate Pulsar.2™ Solid State Drives Review

The Seagate® Pulsar.2™ drive is an enterprise-class, MLC-enabled, up to 800GB SSD that delivers the price-performance, data integrity and endurance benefits needed by performance-hungry enterprise applications - from the world leader in enterprise storage.

This is a review of another of the Seagate Pulsar solutions. The products vary in capacities of 800GB, 400GB, 200GB and 100GB, with the "Encryption" option and with an interface of wither 6-GB/s SAS or SATA 6-GB/s.

Below are some information of the available products:-

• Model ST800FM0012 | 6-Gb/s SAS | 800 GB | Encryption
• Model ST800FM0002 | 6-Gb/s SAS | 800 GB | None
• Model ST400FM0002 | 6-Gb/s SAS | 400 GB | None
• Model ST200FM0002 | 6-Gb/s SAS | 200 GB | None
• Model ST100FM0002 | 6-Gb/s SAS | 100 GB | None
• Model ST400FM0012 | SATA 6Gb/s | 400 GB | None
• Model ST200FM0012 | SATA 6Gb/s | 200 GB | None
• Model ST100FM0012 | SATA 6Gb/s | 100 GB | None

Overview of Seagate Pulsar.2™ Solid State Drives

Data center managers must provide faster data storage and access without incurring data corruption or loss. They must also achieve this while juggling tight IT budgets and managing highly complex system environments. Designed for the enterprise, the Pulsar.2 drive is the first MLC-enabled SSD from an enterprise storage company to deliver the price-performance benefits with the data integrity and drive endurance needed for demanding enterprise environments.

Key Features and Benefits

• *Up to ten full drive writes per day (or 15 petabytes over the life of the device), providing the endurance needed in demanding enterprise environments.
• Protects against unintended data change or loss to ensure accurate data retention and integrity
• Provides OEMs, system builders and data centers with the highest levels of flexibility, service and fulfillment needed for demanding enterprise environments
• 6Gb/s SAS and SATA 6Gb/s for interface scalability and reliability
• 2.5-inch form factor fits existing HDD slots
• Hotpluggable to avoid unnecessary downtime
• Provides a common storage foundation to reduce system complexity and operating overhead
• Helps protect against unexpected data change or loss

*Pulsar drives may not be available in all countries

Best-Fit Applications

• Tier 0, performance-hungry enterprise applications— virtualization, OLTP, data warehousing and cloud computing
• Blade servers, general servers and direct-attached storage
• Enterprise architectures using auto-tiering

Data center managers must provide faster data storage and access without incurring data corruption or loss. They must also achieve this while juggling tight IT budgets and managing highly complex system environments. The Seagate® Pulsar.2™ SSD is an enterprise-class, MLC-enabled, high-capacity (up to 800GB) solid state drive that delivers the price-performance and reliability benefits needed by Tier 0 performance-hungry enterprise applications. And it does so while ensuring consistently fast performance and low response times.

Enterprise-Class Endurance and Data Integrity
Performance is important, but endurance and data integrity are critical. The Pulsar.2 SSD can routinely complete ten full drive writes per day, for a total bytes written score (TBW) of 15 petabytes (for an 800GB drive over the life of the device). The Pulsar.2 drive has been designed for the enterprise environment with the intelligence to automatically detect and correct a multitude of data errors that can occur during normal drive operation to deliver the highest levels of enterprise-class data integrity. Additional endurance features include:

• Advanced media-management technology and Protection Information (PI is SAS only) to help protect against unexpected data change or loss
• Background media scanning to help protect against read disturb data errors
• Power-loss data protection to help ensure data is not lost or inadvertently changed during unexpected power loss
• Wear-leveling algorithms to ensure that every block on the NAND is written to an equal number of times and as evenly as possible to maximize the life of the device
• Garbage collection techniques to identify the next best block on the NAND flash to erase and rewrite before the space is actually needed

Technical Specifications of Seagate® Pulsar.2™ SAS 6Gb/s 800GB Solid State Drive with Secure Encryption

ST800FM0012

Specifications
Model Number	ST800FM0012
Interface	6-Gb/s SAS
Capacity	800GB
Guaranteed logical blocks	1,562,824,368
Programming page size	8192B
PHYSICAL
Height (maximum)	15.00mm (0.591 in)
Width (maximum)	70.10mm (2.760 in)
Length (maximum)	100.45mm (3.955 in)
Weight (typical)	160g (0.353 lb)
PERFORMANCE
Sustained data transfer rate	370MB/s
Average latency	0.273ms
Random read seek time	0.293ms
Random write seek time	0.137ms
I/O data transfer rate	600MB/s
Unrecoverable read errors	1 in 1016
RELIABILITY
MTBF	2,000,000 hours
Annual Failure Rate	0.44%
POWER
Average idle power	4.38W
Average operating power	5.93W
ENVIRONMENT
Ambient Temperature
Operating	5°–60°C
Nonoperating	-40°–70°C
Maximum operating temperature change	20°C per hour
Maximum nonoperating temperature change	20°C per hour
Shock
Operating Shock (max)	1000 Gs for 0.5ms
Nonoperating Shock (max)	1000 Gs for 0.5ms
Features
Storage Type	SSD
Enterprise	Yes
MLC	Yes

Below is a table comparing the technical specifications of all the available Seagate Pulsar.2™ Solid State Drives solutions (Click to enlarge) :-

Data taken from http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/enterprise-ssd-hdd/pulsar/pulsar-2/