Hard drive giant Seagate has finally entered the consumer solid state storage game by announcing the release of its first consumer SSD products early Tuesday. The company unveiled two new products for consumers and power users: the 600 and 600 Pro.
There has been an awakening in the Force. Have you felt it? Get pumped for Star Wars: The Force Awakens by saving 25% on Star Wars: The Digital Movie Collection, available now from Amazon and iTunes.
The Seagate 600 is a traditional SATA III SSD available in 120, 240, and 480GB capacities. Perhaps most interesting, the drive is available in both 7mm and 5mm height configurations, allowing users to fit one into the increasingly slim chassis of today’s laptops and Ultrabooks. The drives use MLC NAND and support up to 500MB/s reads and 400MB/s writes and IOPS of up to 80k reads and 70k writes.
The Seagate 600 Pro adds several capacities – 100, 200, and 400GB – in addition to those found on the standard 600 model, although the differences between the capacities is more meaningful than just storage space. The 100, 200, and 400GB models actually contain 128, 256, and 512GB of memory, respectively, but use the extra space for overprovisioning to maintain performance over time.
| Drive | Capacities | Max Read | Max Write |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seagate 600 | 120GB / 240GB / 480GB | 500MB/s | 400MB/s |
| Seagate 600 Pro | 120GB / 240GB/ 480GB (standard) 100GB / 200GB / 400GB (overprovisioned) |
520MB/s | 450MB/s |
The 600 Pro also adds a series of capacitors to protect against power loss, a longer warranty (5 years versus 3 on the standard 600), higher IOPS, and faster data transfer rates. It also uses MLC NAND and supports up to 520MB/s reads and 450MB/s writes.
AnandTech got an early look at the drives and registered real world average data rates during light workloads of about 326MB/s for the 600 and 323MB/s for the 600 Pro.
Seagate has not announced pricing for the drives but states that they will be available via retail outlets soon.
