Seagate Unveils 4TB SSDs Developed with Micron

Storage vs. Backup: What Your Business Needs to Know

The first fruits of an alliance between Seagate and Micron manifested themselves this week in the form of 4TB solid-state drives (SSDs) that should start showing up in servers and storage systems later this year.

Kent Smith, senior director of product marketing for Seagate Flash, says the Seagate 1200.2 SAS SSD can support up to 12 gigabits-per-second (Gb/s) dual channel throughput and up to 1,800MB-per-second (MB/s) sequential read access.

While SSDs are increasingly being used for primary storage, Smith says it’s unlikely that SSDs will replace traditional hard disk drives (HDDs) completely. Not only is there a price differential between SSDs and HDDs, the Flash memory on which SSDs are based is in comparatively limited supply. For that reason, Smith says HDDs will dominate secondary and tertiary storage for some time to come while continuing to be used alongside SSDs for primary storage.

In general, Smith says Seagate expects to see 4TB SSDs used to support applications where the gap that currently exists between processors and rotating media requires the performance attributes of an SSD. The new Seagate SSD, for example, provides 1,000 times better performance than a traditional HDD.

For all intents and purposes, despite the presence of SDDs that enable IT organizations to run entire databases in Flash, hybrid approaches to storage will dominate enterprise IT environments for years to come. But in those cases where performance is absolutely critical, SSDs will naturally be the preferred form factor.