Ahead of Flash Memory Summit 2016, Seagate is launching a new SATA SSD. The Seagate Nytro XF1230 is the successor to the Seagate 600 Pro that we use in many of the hosting servers at STH. SSDs have been able to saturate the SATA III 6.0gbps interface for years. The vectors these drives generally compete on are the availability of power loss protection, write endurance, capacity and cost.
The Seagate Nytro XF1230 differentiates itself from consumer SSDs by offering full power loss protection via onboard capacitors. The eMLC drive’s write endurance is rated at 0.5 DWPD (240GB) to 0.67 DWPD ( 960GB / 1.92TB) which is about two times what lower-end data center SSDs such as the Intel DC S3500 offers (0.3 DWPD).
Seagate is a titan in the hard drive space. Without a NAND foundry it relies upon buying raw NAND chips. The company has made several acquisitions in the SSD space, including SandForce. As a result, it does have years of engineering expertise in the SSD space as well.
Seagate Nytro XF1230 Specifications
Here are specifications for the four drives that make up the Seagate Nytro XF1230 line (click to expand):
We see that the drives offer a 5-year warranty, much higher than their consumer counterparts. We have found SSDs in our production workloads to be extremely reliable. You can see our results in our dedicated piece: Used enterprise SSDs: Dissecting our production SSD population. All of the Seagate 600 Pro, Pulsar.2 and 1200 SSDs we have installed are still running even after many years of use.
