Today Seagate is announcing a 2TB m.2 NVMe SSD, the Seagate Nytro XM1440. The m.2 SSD form factor has become extremely popular as it is compact enough to fit in everything from laptops to micro servers. The m.2 drives are designed at lower power points than their 2.5″ counterparts making them idea for high performance per watt applications. We have seen a number of full rackmount server motherboards with m.2 slots on the market as well. While the m.2 SSDs generally have an advantage in terms of form factor, they often sacrifice two key attributes to retain the small size: capacity and power loss protection. The new Seagate Nytro XM1440 is an expansion of the company’s current XF1440 / XM1440 line-up bringing a 1.9TB (2TB class) SSD to the m.2 form factor with power loss protection.
The Seagate Nytro XM1440 is based on eMLC NAND. Even using the higher-endurance NAND the rated endurance is 0.3 DWPD with a 2 million hour MTBF. When we recently looked at SSDs in use by STH and others, the 0.3 DWPD seems ample for most workloads. These drives are in the same family as the Nytro XF1440 2.5″ NVMe SSDs as well.
The company expects the new 2TB Seagate Nytro XM1440 m.2 model to be available in November 2016. We were told the lower capacity Seagate Nytro XM1440 SSDs are currently available in the channel. We did our own investigation scouring the sites of Amazon, Newegg and a few other common retailers and were unable to find the drives for sale. We are certainly excited about the prospect of a m.2 SSD with PLP as it would make an ideal SSD for several of the server form factors we are using.
Here is an excerpt from the official press release:
Seagate Technology plc (NASDAQ: STX), today unveiled a first-of-its kind, high-capacity drive that can help data centers more easily accommodate exponential data growth, while still maintaining high levels of computing power and performance. The two terabyte (TB) version of its Nytro® XM1440 M.2 non-volatile memory express (NVMe) Solid State Drive (SSD) is the highest-capacity, enterprise-class M.2 NVMe SSD available today, making it well suited for demanding enterprise applications that require fast data access, capacity and processing.
As the latest addition to the Seagate Nytro SSD product line, the 2TB Nytro XM1440 M.2 NVMe SSD is designed to accelerate enterprise data access, with twice the density of prior M.2 NVMe environments. Optimized for read-intensive and mixed workloads, its high capacity and small form factor are ideal for today’s cloud and enterprise data center environments, where speed and processing power in a small footprint are increasingly important. The drive can help meet the needs of demanding enterprise applications including online transaction processing, high-performance computing and big data analytics. It also helps manage storage growth with deduplication and compression, allowing data centers to easily create more virtual machines instantly without having to add additional servers — enabling today’s data centers to more easily manage their ever-expanding storage growth.
“Data and time are money, and nowhere is this more apparent than in today’s enterprises, which are grappling with how to accommodate ever-increasing amounts of data without losing the ability to quickly access and process it to continue deriving value,” said Brett Pemble, Seagate’s general manager and vice president of SSD products. “This latest version of the Nytro XM1440 M.2 NVMe SSD is the first of its kind and pushes the boundaries for enterprises, so they don’t have to sacrifice speed for access and availability. They can continue to scale operations in an efficient manner and still get the most value from their data, but without the extra overhead.”
With active power consumption of 7 watts — nearly half the power consumption of similar performing drives available today — the 2TB Nytro XM1440 M.2 NVMe SSD can reach performance levels as high as 30,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS) per watt, enabling high levels of computing in the smallest power envelope. And, the drive’s flexible form factor means enterprises can easily bring PCIe NVMe performance to their data centers without having to overhaul their entire infrastructure.
The 2TB Nytro XM1440 M.2 NVMe SSD has end-to-end data protection, including low-density parity-check error correction and RAISE™ technology, which delivers RAID-like data protection and recovery from potentially catastrophic flash memory failures. The drive also comes with a power loss data protection circuit to help prevent data loss in the event of a power interruption.
The 2TB Nytro XM1440 M.2 NVMe SSD will be available through channel partners in November 2016.
For datacenters not yet prepared to utilize the new M.2 interface, this same solution is also available as the new Nytro XP7102 PCIe NVMe Add-in Card, available through channel partners now.
