Seagate intros its first SSD, vows 7mm HDD
updated 07:35 am EST, Tue December 8, 2009
Seagate Pulsar built for speed, longevity
After historically fighting flash storage, Seagate today confirmed its change in direction with the launch of its Pulsar solid-state drive. The 2.5-inch, SATA drive is useful for notebooks but chiefly targeted at servers and other computers where both speed and longevity are important. By using single-level cell flash memory, it has an 0.44 percent annualized failure rate and yet reaches peak read speeds of 240MB per second and peak writes of 200MB per second.
The drive measures just 7mm (0.28in) high and has capacities ranging up to 200GB. Seagate has already been shipping the Pulsar for pre-made systems since September, but it hasn't said how soon stand-alone drives should be available or what their prices will be.
In addition to the SSD, the company has said it plans to release the first-ever rotating hard drive at the same 7mm height and should unveil it at CES next month. The disk will be significantly thinner than 9.5mm hard drives and should make even thinner notebooks possible without having to resort to SSDs or 1.8-inch spinning disks. Seagate hopes for it to lead to ultraportables that cost less by using less dense storage. Capacities and other details won't be available until the event.
Pulsar
