Seagate has revealed it's fastest ever Solid State Drive (SSD) at the Open Compute Project Summit earlier this month in San Jose, CA. The production ready drives were pacing 10GB/sec. Previous drives available to the public had topped out at 6GB/sec so a 66% speed increase. The drive is Open Compute Project (OCP) compliant which makes it easy to integrate into very large scale data projects.

 

 

What is a Solid State Drive?

Solid state drives are an integrated circuit driven replacement for traditiona disk drives. Disk drives require physical spinning and seeking of the disk in order to retrieve data, solid state drives eliminates this inefficiency by direct access circuits making for quieter and quicker data retrieval. Current SSD technology makes us of NAND based flash memory for persistent storage of data. Although the performance of SSD is superior an equivalent SSD storage costs about 4x the equivalent disk storage currently.

“Your data is only as good as how easily you can access it and put it to use.  Seagate is committed to providing the full spectrum of technologies to help meet the diverse needs of organizations so they can unlock this value.  Whether for consumer cloud or business applications, this SSD will help improve on demands for fast access to information, where split seconds drive incremental value gains.” Brett Pemble, Vice President Seagate Technology

Seagate's latest drive utilizes the Non Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) protocol which is designed to replace the older serial AT Attachment (SATA) standard.  The 10GB/sec unit displayed utilized a 16 lane PCIe slot, but a seperate version is being developed for 8 lane slots that will run at 6.7GB/sec