If you have an older system that is still chugging along with a traditional hard disk drive (HDD), the easiest and most cost-effective way to speed up the machine in many standard uses is to drop in a solid state drive (SSD). This not only true for consumer and small businesses, but especially for enterprise market where fast IO response times in servers and workstations are critical.

Seagate has just unveiled what it is calling "the world’s fastest SSD," and the performance differential between it and the next closest competitive offering is significant, if their claims are true. The SSD, which Seagate today announced is in "production-ready" form, is fully compliant with the Open Compute Project (OCP) specification employed by hyperscale data centers and employs the NVMe protocol to help it achieve breakneck speeds. So just how fast is it? Seagate says that the new SSD is capable of 10GB/sec of throughput when used in 16-lane PCIe slots. Seagate says that this is 4GB/sec faster than the next fast competing SSD solution.







The company is also working on a second, lower-performing variant that works in 8-lane PCIe slots and has a throughput of 6.7GB/sec (which is still damn fast). Seagate sees the second model as a more cost-effect SSD for businesses that want a high performing SSD, but want to keep costs and power consumption under control.

Regardless of which model organizations choose to deploy, Seagate envisions its SSDs being used for modeling or statistical analysis on their own or in conjunction with HDDs for a cost-effective hybrid storage array.







“Your data is only as good as how easily you can access it and put it to use,” said Seagate GM and VP of SSD Products Brett Pemble. “Seagate is committed to providing the full spectrum of technologies to help meet the diverse needs of organizations so they can unlock this value. Whether for consumer cloud or business applications, this SSD will help improve on demands for fast access to information, where split seconds drive incremental value gains.”

Seagate isn’t ready yet to discuss pricing for its blazing fast SSDs and oddly they haven't disclosed a model name either, but it does say that general availability for its customers will open up during the summer.