The Seagate 600 SSD is a major addition to the solid-state drive market. The drive is the first consumer-grade SSD to come from Seagate, which, prior to this, offered general consumers only regular platter-based storage solutions.

It's also the first SSD that's available in both 7mm and 5mm designs, making it the most versatile SSD option. The drive can fit in a whole range of applications, from regular desktops to laptops, to many ultrabooks, and possibly some future tablets.

In my testing, the new drive offered very fast performance, proving itself to be a great alternative to even the speediest hard drive, and even faster than many other SSDs on the market.

On the downside, the 600 SSD has the same power consumption as a regular 5,400rpm laptop hard drive and comes with very high suggested retail price of $330 for 240GB (or $600 for 480GB, and $200 for 120GB). As with most new SSDs, though, the actual street price should be much lower when the drive actually ships early next month.

If you can wait until then, the Seagate 600 SSD will surely make an excellent buy. Otherwise, check out the alternatives on this list, which are available now.



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Drive type 5mm- or 7mm-thick, 2.5-inch standard internal solid-state drive

Connector options SATA 3 (6Gbps), SATA 2, SATA Available capacities 120GB, 240GB, 480GB

Product dimensions 2.5-inch standard Capacity of test unit 480GB Controller Link A Media Device’s LM87800 Flash memory type

19nm Toshiba 2-bit-per-cell MLC NAND OSes supported Windows, Mac, Linux

First standard 5mm design

The Seagate 600 SSD uses the standard 2.5-inch laptop design but is available in two thicknesses, 7mm and 5mm. While the 7mm is currently the most popular thickness for SSDs, the 5mm thickness is newer and was first introduced in the WD Blue hard drive. This design is made for ultrathin devices, including ultrabooks and future tablets.

The difference in thickness doesn't affect the drive's capacities or performance. Each of the two thicknesses is available in three capacities -- 120GB, 240GB, and 480GB -- with exactly the same performance ratings. The 240GB and 480GB capacities are able to offer up to 500MBps and 400MBps in sequential reading and writing, respectively. They offer random read and write speeds of up to 80K-IOPS (input/output operations per second) and 70K-IOPS, respectively. The 128GB capacity, however, has a slightly slower write speed rating of 300MBps for sequential writing and up to 60K-IOPS in random writing.

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As with all new internal drives, the Seagate 600 SSD supports the latest SATA 3 (6Gbps) and comes with the standard SATA connector. This means the new SSD can be used in any situation where a standard SATA hard drive is used. It doesn't comes with a 3.5-inch drive-bay converter, however, which would make it easier to install in a desktop. This is not a deal-breaker, however, since you can just leave the drive hanging loose inside a computer chassis. Having no moving parts, SSDs don't need to be attached securely to the chassis to work properly. You can also buy a drive-bay caddy from a third party.