Stefan Mileschin

Today Seagate and Micron are jointly announcing their latest generation of Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) MLC SSDs for enterprise use. The new families of drives are designed to significantly broaden the Enterprise SSD lineup of both companies with a wider range of capacities, features, and performance options, for with up to 36 new drive models altogether.

Making today's announcement particularly different (and wordy) is the fact that both companies are announcing the same drives under their own brands. Developed in a joint partnership between the two companies, Seagate and Micron have developed a single line of drives to be sold under different brands by each manufacturer for the purpose of making the drives available from multiple vendors for second-sourcing needs. For Seagate these drives will be known as the 1200.2 series, and will total 36 drives altogether. Meanwhile for Micron these drives will be known as the S600DC series.

We'll start things off with Seagate, who has released the most information on these new drives. In Seagate's 1200.2 lineup the drives are available in four different tiers that trade cost against the higher endurance and performance, enabled through greater over-provisioning. The “High Endurance” line (rated for 25 drive writes per day) is tuned for write-intensive workloads and lots of random I/O. The “Mainstream Endurance” line (10 DWPD) is intended for a workload with a 70/30 mix of reads and writes, while the “Light Endurance” (3 DWPD) and “Scalable Endurance” (1 DWPD) are for very heavily read-intensive workloads with mostly sequential I/O.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9487/s...for-enterprise