Interview with Seagate about SSDs
Rich followed up by saying that Seagate wants to focus on the enterprise market for now and give them a product that will fit in with the current levels of performance and endurance expected in that space. Seagate has taken input from consumers to create a product to meet that demand. To start out they are going to begin with SLC-based products [due to customer input] but feel that the SSD must move to MLC [Multi-Level Cell] in order to be a viable volume product. The issue is that in its current form, MLC is not viable as an enterprise standard - only when this format becomes perfected you can expect Seagate to move to MLC.
But the decision to use SLC or MLC is not the only one Seagate is facing, they are also working to determine the appropriate connection to use; SAS or SATA-II. Each one has pros and cons to them. As it stands right now both are limited to a 3Gb/s transfer rate which in many cases can be quickly saturated by an SSDs or array of SSDs. This limitation that they share should be lifted soon as they both move to 6Gb/s in the near future - as you might already know, AMD is going to be the first company with SATA 3.0 interface, coming in the form of SB850 Southbridge chip. SAS [Serial Attached SCSI - Small Computer System Interface] has a couple of major advantages over SATA though. The two biggest are dual port and error correction. SAS has a much deeper level of error correction and can work all the way down to the media and communicate back to the host. SATA has some basic “best-effort” error correction but is not enough for business critical or mission critical applications. In the end I think that SAS will be the ultimate choice for SSDs in the enterprise segment. SAS offers better performance and robustness than what SATA can provide. http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news...-own-ssds.aspx | 