Seagate tosses its hat into the solid state drive (SSD) market today with the unveiling of its Pulsar drive, a unit aimed at enterprise-level blade and server applications. The new drive stores up to 200GB of data in a 2.5-inch form factor with a SATA interface. With the Pulsar drive, Seagate lays claim to being "the first enterprise HDD vendor to deliver an enterprise-class SSD solution."

The Pulsar drive is built with single-layer-cell (SLC) technology, which Seagate says enhances the reliability and durability of the SSD. Solid state drives offer much faster data access speeds than the rotating media in conventional hard disk drives (HDDs) since there are no moving parts.

According to Seagate, the Pulsar drive achieves a peak performance of 30,000 read IOPS (input/output operations per second) and 25,000 write IOPS, which is a measure of how a drive processes small, random blocks of information. The drive is rated at up to 240 megabytes per second for sequential reads and 200 mbps for sequential writes; a measure of how it accesses large chunks of contiguous data. The drive comes with a five-year warranty and has an annualized failure rate (AFR) of 0.44 percent, according to Seagate.

"Seagate is optimistic about the enterprise SSD opportunity and views the product category as enabling expansion of the overall storage market for both SSDs and HDDs," said Dave Mosley, Seagate's executive vice president for sales, marketing, and product line management in a press release.

Solid state drives built with single layer cell technology can offer faster read/write speeds than those built with multiple layer cell technology (MLC), but MLC drives can offer more storage. The Pulsar drive, which was made available to select OEM (original equipment manufacturer) customers in September, is now available to all OEMs.