Seagate Unveils Big, Fast Pulsar SSDs

Today, Seagate unveiled two new models in their solid state solutions lineup: the Pulsar.2 and Pulsar XT.2. The two drives are pretty similar, save for their specific kind of flash memory technology: the Pulsar.2 sticks with more affordable MLC cells while the XT.2 uses the ultra-reliable (but ultra-pricey) SLC variant.

The Pulsar.2 also supports both SAS and SATA 6Gbps interfaces while the Pulsar XT.2 just supports the latter. It’s going to need it, too – Seagate is calling the new XT.2 the fastest single drive in their entire portfolio. Sequential read speeds are quoted as 360MB/s, with writes hitting pretty closely behind at 300MB/s. Random read IOPS hit 48k, while random writes still managed 22k.

No price has been set for the drives as yet, but Seagate is definitely going for the enterprise market with these guys – which means that however much they end up costing, you can bet it won’t be cheap. The storage giant is planning to start shipping the drives in quantity to their partners sometime in early Q2 of this year.