Seagate unveils PCIe x16 SSD with 10GB/s bandwidth at Open Compute Summit

Seagate unveils PCIe x16 SSD with 10GB/s bandwidth at Open Compute Summit
The Open Compute Summit is a yearly meeting of the Whose Who of the data center world.

The Open Compute Summit is a yearly meeting of the Whose Who of the data center world. It’s put on by the four-year-old Open Compute Project, and serves as a platform for both sharing data center hardware designs and showcasing new products. This year, Seagate is demonstrating PCI Express-based SSDs capable of up to 10GB/s of throughput (and it’s safe to bet that this refers to sequential read speeds).

This new drive will use the NVMe protocol, but the company hasn’t released much in the way of details as to what powers the drive. Anandtech did a deep diveinto the architecture and came to the conclusion that the drive is likely using a four-way PCI Express switch combined with four of its Nytro XM1440 controllers. If that’s true, it punches some holes in Seagate’s claim that its new 10GB/s monster is 4GB/s faster than the next-fastest solution. Multi-controller architectures are common in the high-end SSD world, and already offer performance in excess of 10GB/s.

Seagate’s SSD design

“It’s important to keep our industry peers informed when leading-edge technology capabilities are achieved,” said Kent Smith, senior director of product marketing for flash products at Seagate. “This week’s OCP Summit is an ideal moment to demonstrate our thought leadership in flash technology and showcase our industry-leading PCIe performance—especially given the work and collaboration with customers and partners that has already gone into this product.”

Translation: “Neener, neener, NEENER.”

The big question is whether or not we’ll ever see these kinds of speeds and capacities trickle into the consumer market. We suspect they will, over time, as controllers advance and 3D NAND becomes more common, but manufacturers are also hungry to establish high-end PCI Express storage solutions that lock down enterprise markets.

The PC hard drive market has existed for decades, but maintains a steady performance differential between mainstream 5400 and 7200 RPM drives and enterprise products that operate at either 10K or 15K RPMs. It’s true that the advent of SSDs made faster spindle speeds largely irrelevant to the mainstream PC market, but Western Digital was the only company to try to bridge the gap between consumer and enterprise products, with the 10,000 RPM VelociRaptor. The high-end of the SSD market is likely optimized for data center workloads that a standard desktop PC doesn’t encounter, and it’s not clear that the average user would see much benefit from moving to a 10GB/s SSD as compared to a conventional SATA drive at 500-600MB/s of throughput. The upgrade from hard drive to SSD remains one of the most important you can make to improve overall system performance.

Solutions like Intel’s Optanecould break this bottleneck, though that hardware is also likely to target top-end platforms if and when it comes to market. For now, consumer SSDs are typically focusing on expanding capacity, with performance delivered through controller updates or faster protocols like NVMe, as opposed to using higher-speed NAND flash.