Seagate Enters SSD Market With Pulsar Drive

Storage behemoth Seagate has launched its first solid state drive product, the Pulsar, which aims at securing the company's place as one major SSD player in the forthcoming years.

Until now, the SSD market was dominated by the likes of Intel, Crucial or Kingston, which are predominantly Flash memory manufacturers. There were even rumours back in August 2008 that Seagate was about to buy flash specialist Sandisk, a move that never happened.

Still, with the Pulsar, the world's largest hard disk manufacturer is squarely aiming the high end Enterprise market - where its Barracuda spinning drives once competed - as this segment is likely to be capable of paying the premium price.

 Dave Mosley, Seagate executive vice president of sales, marketing, and product line management, said in a statement that "Seagate is optimistic about the enterprise SSD opportunity and views the product category as enabling expansion of the overall storage market for both SSDs and HDDs".

The Pulsar range uses SLC technology (to improve reliability), has up to 200GB capacity and is housed in a 2.5-inch form factor with a SATA interface. According to Seagate, the Pulsar is capable of reaching 30,000 read I/O's per second (IOPS) and 25,000 write IOPS.

It can also deliver a maximum data throughput of 240MBps sequential read and 200MBps sequential write. Seagate has already confirmed that it would be releasing other SSD devices in a near future.