SSD Drive Toolkit

Seagate Technology, the world’s largest hard drives manufacturer, announced its first Solid State Disk (Solid State Drive – SSD). Seagate Pulsar made in 2.5-inch form-factor has  height of 7 mm and is equipped with a3 Gbit/s  SATA 2. The SSD is designed for rackmount and other servers and allows to reduce energy consumption of data centers.

SLC(Single-Level Cell) lies at the heart of the drive technology, as it provides higher reliability in comparison with the multi-level structure technology, Seagate assures. According to the Seagate, Pulsar’s Annualized Failure Rate (AFR)  is 0,44%. AFR is equal to the Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) divided by the number of hours that the device worked for a year and expressed as a percentage. For example, if MTBF is 1.5 million hours and the device operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, his AFR is 0.58%. Basically AFR is probability of Failure for one year of the SSD usage. As for the interface SATA it was selected to meet wishes of Seagate’s clients, said the company.

Peak performance of Pulsar for 4KB-blocks is 30 thousands reads per second and 25 thousands write operations per second. Read speed of 30 thousand operations per second can be sustained by any Pulsar SSD while the write speed varies depending on the capacity of the drive – from 2600 to 10500 transactions per second (it’s pretty less than peak speed). Peak data transfer rate in the read mode is 240 MB/s, writing – 200 MB/s.

“Seagate is optimistic about the enterprise SSD opportunity and views the product category as enabling expansion of the overall storage market for both SSDs and HDDs,” commented Dave Mosley, Seagate executive vice president, Sales, Marketing, and Product Line Management. “Our strategy is to provide our customers with the exact storage device they need for any application, regardless of the component technology used. We are delivering on that strategy with the Pulsar™ drive, and you can expect additional products in the future from Seagate using a variety of solid state and rotating media components.”

The drive comes in three versions – a capacity of 50 GB (ST950011FS), 100 GB (ST9100011FS) and 200 GB (ST9200011FS). There is protection against power supply failures – device has nonvolatile cache and in case of power supply interruption, sent  to the device, but not recorded in the flash memory data is not lost. SSD’s operating temperature varies from 5 to 60 degrees Celsius, harmless non-operating temperature – from -40 to +70.

According to officials of Seagate, Pulsar will be followed by other series of Seagate Solid State Drives. Ultimately vendor intends to provide solutions for networked storage systems of higher price range (such as EMC Symmetrix), midrange (Clariion), data storage systems with direct connections to the server (DAS) and blade servers, which Pulsar focuses . Commercial delivery of the Pulsar began in September 2009.

According to Gartner in 2010 will be sold twice the SSD compared to 2009, and the volume of the market value will reach $ 1 billion. Samsung was the first large producer of traditional magnetic disk which stepped on the SSD market. Western Digital company in March 2009 has acquired SiliconSystems, supplier of solid state drives, for $ 65 million.

According to analysts, the success of Seagate at the new market will depend on the existing relationships with the partners of the company like Dell, HP, IBM and other manufacturers of enterprise solutions. It won’t be easy for Seagate to get huge slice of SSD profit as it enters the market not first by the long way. In addition to the aforementioned Samsung here already a dozen manufacturers are presented, including Texas Memory Systems, Intel, Fusion-io, STE, and Pliant, Violin Memory and SandForce.

In September HP has begun shipping of the second generation Solid State Drives for HP Proliant servers. In the past year since first introduction of SSD in HP servers,  there appeared several solutions to shortcomings of the SSD technology.

The first flaw – per gigabyte price of solid state drives today is much higher than that of traditional hard drives. This disease can be treated only one way – increasing production volume and information density on each disk. And we went this way: now you have opportunity to install 60 GB and 120 GB disks.

The second nowadays drawback of SSD – it has lower maximum number of read/write cycles than magnetic hard drives have. It can strongly affect system which intensively works with data processing. In order to resolve this problem and delay degradation of SSD manufacturers implement special algorithms on microcode level for load balancing of the physical memory cells. It is also recommended to buy SSDs with redundant capacity and use it mostly for tasks requiring data reading (financial data real-time analysis, CAD, 3D modeling, etc.).

Adhering to these recommendation HP also switched to 3-Gbit SATA interface. This, in addition to a significant data read/write rate increasing, allows to use hot swap disks. Now HP’s servers with SSD can be applied in mission-critical applications without fear of data loss.

The new drives are available in the standard HP ProLiant Universal Drive Carrier (UDC) shell, 2.5 or 3.5-inch form factor, so they can be applied not only in blade servers, but in most other models HP ProLiant G6 and G5, supporting UDC, as well as  in some models of HP Integrity.

HP ProLiant G5

Actual manufacturer of SSD is Samsung Electronics, but as HP sends it in market under its own brand, HP’s engineers had been thoroughly testing all electronics for several months. Therefore today the reliability of Solid State Drives is near high-speed SAS disks. At the same time SSDs have unique advantages, which provide greater scope in terms of using environment: extended operating temperature range (0-60° C instead of the usual 10-35° C), lower heat production and excellent resistance to shock and vibration.