Stefan Mileschin

Seagate is looking to break records with two enterprise SSDs they're showing off at Flash Memory Summit this week. The first drive is one that's been seen before: the 10GB/s PCIe x16 SSD that Seagate demonstrated in March. It has now been named the Nytro XP7200 and is scheduled for mass production in Q4. Based on four Nytro XM1440 M.2 SSDs under one heatsink on a full height expansion card, the XP7200 is more of a backplane than a drive on its own. Unlike some other multi-controller PCIe SSDs, the XP7200 does not include a PCIe switch chip. This means that the card can only be fully utilized in PCIe x16 slots that support operation as four separate x4 links. Plugging the XP7200 into a PCIe x8 slot would render two of the four M.2 drives inaccessible. And because there are four independent NVMe SSDs on the card, hitting the peak advertised read speed of 10GB/s requires the use of software-based RAID-0 or a similar striping scheme.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/10555/...d-60tb-sas-ssd