Computex 2013: Seagate showcases consumer SSDs, desktop and laptop SSHDs

Storage major Seagate had announced its foray into the solid state drives space last month. At Computex 2013, Seagate announced the global availability of these products.

On display was the Seagate SSD lineup and the solid state hard drives as well. Seagate had also announced its 5mm ultra-thin laptop hard drives which will come in the 500GB capacity. But the ultra-thin drives will only be available to OEM partners and you cannot buy it off the counter, yet.

Coming to the products displayed today, we were first shown the Seagate 600 series SSD, followed by the 600 Pro series SSD and the 1200 series SSD. The Seagate 600 series SSD is targetted at consumers who are looking to upgrade their laptop drives and comes in 120 GB, 240GB and 480GB capacities. The 600 series SSD comes with a 5mm height as well as a 7mm height.

Seagate 600 Pro series	Seagate 600 Pro series	Seagate 600 series	Seagate 600 series	Seagate 1200 series

The 600 Pro SSD is aimed at performance-hungry,read-intensive, data centre applications, such as data indexing, edge caching,data streaming or gaming delivery. The target audience includes cloud system builders, content delivery networks, power and space constrained data centres. It comes in capacities such as 100GB, 120GB, 200GB, 240GB,400GB, 480GB.

The last series to be shown was the 1200 series SSD. This series comes with a 12Gb/s SAS interface as opposed to the regular 6Gb/s SATA 3 interface seen on the drives above. Thanks to such high interface specs, this series is targetted at enterprise storage solution makers. The capacities go from 200 GB to 800 GB and they have a random read/write IOPS rates of 120,000 and 140,000 respectively.

Next up we had a look at the solid state hard drives for the laptop as well as the desktop. Entering the third generation of its hybrid drives, Seagate has still kept the capacity to 8GB while using the multi-level cell NAND instead of the more expensive single-level cell NAND. The capacities available on the laptop are 500GB and 1TB and for the desktop SSHDs the capacities are 1TB, 2TB and 4TB drives. The desktop hybrid drives are the first of its kind though.

Desktop and Laptop SSHDs

We were a bit surprised to see no performance hit despite using a 5400 RPM drive and an MLC NAND instead of the 7200 RPM and SLC NAND used in previous generation drives. But Seagate representatives told us that the caching algorithms had been improved. We can confirm this statement only after testing the third generation laptop SSHDs. The main reason to go with 5400 RPM drives was attributed to keeping the power consumption on the lower side, as according to Seagate these SSHDs will be seen in future laptops and ultrabooks where battery life is important.