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Seagate says it's scooped the 'fastest ever PCIe drive' record

10GB/sec? Not too bad, even for an SSD

Seagate is going to demonstrate a 10GB/sec PCI flash card that spews out bits like a fire hose on steroids at the coming Open Compute Project Summit.

There will actually be two cards shown: an 8-lane and a 16-lane product. Both are compatible with Facebook’s Open Compute Project (OCP), which aims to drive down the costs of IT hardware components for hyperscale data centres.

We are not told any performance details at all apart from the 10GB/sec throughput for the 16-lane card, which will make it the fastest SSD available, and a 6.7GB/sec throughput rating for the 8-lane card. Both use an NVMe interface.

Seagate’s Brett Pemble, SSD products VP and GM, provided a canned quote: “Whether for consumer cloud or business applications, this SSD will help improve on demands for fast access to information, where split seconds drive incremental value gains.”

Potential customers are thought to be large-scale cloud providers and web applications, weather modelling, and statistical trends analysis. It could be used to process data for object storage or real-time needs, according to Seagate

Fusion-io had an ioDrive Octal doing 6.2GB/sec in late 2010 and this was a custom SLC NAND product built for one customer.

Seagate’s Nytro WarpDrive (BFH8-3200) did 4GB/sec sequential reads. It was announced in June 2013. Its Nytro XP6500 also did 4GB/sec and it was announced in August last year.

Toshiba had a Z-Drive R4 CloudServ it picked up with the OCZ acquisition, and this is rated at 6.4GB/sec. It was announced in February 2012.

Micron and Seagate have a deal about flash chip supply, so we expect the new cards to use Micron chips and also, possibly, have Nytro branding.

Seagate’s two PCI flash card fliers are being sampled now and expected to ship in the summer.

They will displayed t Seagate’s booth [#C12] in the Open Compute Project Summit 2016 in San Jose, Calif. March 9-10. ®

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