Seagate is now shipping its Enterprise Turbo SSHD, which is the world’s fastest hard drive and the industry’s first enterprise solid-state hard drive, according to the company. It combines hard-drive capacity with solid-state flash to enable high-speed performance for mission-critical data, Seagate says. It also increases random performance by a factor of three compared to existing 15k-rpm drives and offers 600 Gbytes of capacity and 32 Gbytes of NAND, Seagate reports (see the figure).
Seagate has been working with major OEMs to test the Enterprise Turbo SSHD over the past year. For example, IBM has introduced it as an option for its System x servers, which target small and medium businesses or distributed large enterprises. These hybrid drives combine a cache of NAND flash and conventional media to accelerate hard-disk drive (HDD) performance for higher I/O performance while leveraging the capacity and cost of spinning media for primary storage, IBM says.
According to preliminary performance testing using standard system benchmarking tools, a 10k-rpm version of the enterprise SSHD boasts IOPS that are more than twice that of standard 600-Gbyte 10k-rpm HDDs. Seagate says the innovation results in improved and more cost-effective performance for servers running mission-critical applications like big data analytics, virtual desktop infrastructure, and database transaction processing.
The drive fine-tunes storage tiering by caching and the I/O level, addressing performance gaps and bottlenecks often found in tiered system environments. Its self-encrypting drive option maximizes security for data-at-rest. It enables lower-cost server and storage configurations, making it appealing for OEMs and system builders who demand the highest scalable performance at an affordable cost as well, Seagate says, for significantly improved $/IOPS.