Seagate today began distribution channel shipments of the Pulsar XT.2 solid state drive (SSD) optimized for enterprise environments. The company will also commence channel shipments of the Pulsar.2 SSD, the first Multi-Level Cell (MLC) Flash-enabled SSD from an enterprise hard drive maker, on July 29. The Pulsar XT.2 SSD combines Single-Level Cell (SLC) flash with a native 6Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interface. The 2.5-inch SSD with up to 400GB of capacity is optimized for complex, mixed workloads typical of enterprise environments such as online transaction processing (OLTP), database or web indexing, and email.

The Pulsar.2 SSD has been designed specifically for data centers. The drive, featuring up to 800GB of capacity, automatically detects and corrects any number of data errors that could otherwise plague normal drive operations. The SSD supports both native 6Gb/s SAS and Serial ATA (SATA) 6Gb/s interfaces for primary and secondary server storage.

The Pulsar XT.2 400GB SSD has met the standards of the Storage Performance Council (SPC), a vendor-neutral consortium that defines, administers and promotes storage benchmarks, for consistent and sustainable enterprise-class performance. Seagate claims that the new SPC-1C Result demonstrated that the Pulsar XT.2 SSD delivers the sustainable storage device performance enterprises need round-the-clock - regardless of the workload complexity or changing server input-output (I/O) intensity levels.

In a single storage device configuration, the Seagate Pulsar XT.2 SSD produced an SPC-1C Result of 20,008.82 SPC-1 IOPS with an average response time of 2.05 milliseconds over a 10-minute duration, compared to an SPC-1C Sustainability Test result of 20,011.07 IOPS with an average response time of 2.08 milliseconds over four hours, demonstrating consistent enterprise-class performance over time.

The real-world SPC-1C benchmark, designed for storage components, consists of I/O patterns typically found in online transaction processing (OLTP) applications, with a focus on random accesses. Unlike Iometer testing, which gauges IOPS performance using discrete measurements of random reads, random writes, sequential reads or sequential writes, SPC-1C benchmarks test storage components using a dynamic blend of random and sequential reads and writes to emulate real-world enterprise workloads.

As part of the SPC-1C Result, the Pulsar XT.2 SSD also met the new SPC-1C requirement for data prefilling. Prefilling reduces any potential performance gains storage component vendors may produce by destroking a device, or limiting access to certain portions of the storage space to artificially increase performance. Prefilling writes random data to the entire addressable space of the drive.

Details of the Seagate Pulsar XT.2 SSD SPC-1C Result can be found at: http://www.storageperformance.org/results/benchmark_results_spc1c/#c00012 .

Specifications
Model Number	ST400FX0002
Interface	6-Gb/s SAS
Capacity	400GB
PHYSICAL
Height (maximum)	15.00mm (0.591 in)
Width (maximum)	70.10mm (2.760 in)
Length (maximum)	100.45mm (3.955 in)
Weight (typical)	200g (.441 lb)
PERFORMANCE
Sustained data transfer rate	360MB/s
I/O data transfer rate	600MB/s
Unrecoverable read errors	1 in 1016
RELIABILITY
Annual Failure Rate	0.44%
POWER
12V start max current	0.45A
5V start max current	1.15A
Average idle power	5.92W
Average operating power	6.67W
ENVIRONMENT
Ambient Temperature
Operating	0°–60°C
Nonoperating	-40°–70°C
Maximum operating temperature change	20°C per hour
Maximum nonoperating temperature change	20°C per hour
Shock
Operating Shock (max)	1000 Gs for 0.5ms
Nonoperating Shock (max)	1000 Gs for 0.5ms
Features
Storage Type	SSD
Enterprise	Yes
NAND Flash Type	SLC
Peak sequential 128KB read/write data transfer rate (MB/s max)	360/300
Peak 4KB random read/write command rate (IOPs)	48,000/22,000
Relative Humidity (op & non-op) Non-condensing	5% to 95%
Operating Vibration 20-2000Hz	16.3 Grms
Non-operating Vibration 20-2000Hz	16.3 Grms