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  • numberoneoppa - Tuesday, May 7, 2013 - link

    It's too bad about the idle power consumption, but if the prices are decent, I might pick up a higher capacity variant to replace my 80GB m25 G2 in my desktop.
  • ssj3gohan - Tuesday, May 7, 2013 - link

    I don't think Anandtech has implemented their improved (DIPM-enabled) power consumption tests yet, so the idle figures here are pretty much meaningless. When it comes to market, check the datasheet for actual idle power consumption.
  • Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, May 7, 2013 - link

    Seagate's datasheet shows average idle power of 1.1W: http://images.anandtech.com/doci/6935/Screen%20Sho...
  • lightsout565 - Wednesday, May 8, 2013 - link

    Does anyone know how power consumption compares to the 128GB Samsung 830? In Anand's review of the 830 he mentions, "Samsung sampled the 512GB version of the SSD 830 so it's unclear how much the sheer number of NAND die impacts power consumption here." During the test of the 513GB version, it showed 1.22W at idle.
  • Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, May 8, 2013 - link

    The 128GB SSD 830 idles at 0.38W (I think the firmware is also newer, the 512GB had pre-production FW as far as I know). As always, you can find all our SSDs (and other components) in the Bench, here's the 128GB SSD 830:

    http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/533
  • cactusdog - Tuesday, May 7, 2013 - link

    I don't understand why Seagate and WD were so slow in the SSD market. They should have a complete range of SSDs by now. They could have just rebranded OEM drives (if they didn't want to spend money) and would have sold millions just from their name alone. Like Kingston and others did...... I don't get it.
  • Sabresiberian - Tuesday, May 7, 2013 - link

    I wonder if the main HD manufacturers here were doing a bit of "American auto industry" thinking. Like "We sold all the gas guzzlers we could make before, how are we supposed to know the general population is going to want cars that get better gas mileage?" Chrysler and GM had to be bailed out twice for that kind of thinking.

    So, were Seagate and Western Digital thinking "We're selling all the HDs we can make, why should we get into SSDs?" I don't know, but it's an explanation that seems to fit, to my way of thinking anyway.
  • Powerlurker - Tuesday, May 7, 2013 - link

    I think it's more that Seagate and WD have extensive expertise in manufacturing HDDs that can't be replicated by competitors and lots of industrial infrastructure that only they (and Toshiba at this point) have. Meanwhile, on the SSD front, they would be competing with any idiot on the Pacific Rim with a reference design and a pick-and-place line. SSDs are rapidly becoming commodity products at the consumer level and long term profitability in the segment requires you to have your own special sauce (controller technology, firmware expertise, a NAND fab, or some other unique advantage) which WD and Seagate don't really have at this point.
  • Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, May 7, 2013 - link

    While WD and Seagate lack the SSD expertise, they have the distribution channels and resources. Hynix is a good example of a company that has all the expertise they need to develop a competitive SSD but their distribution channel is lacking. Seagate, on the other hand, operates globally and can reach billions of potential buyers in a short period of time. Even if you have a good product, it's fairly meaningless if it can't reach most of the market. Hynix actually makes SSDs but they are doing absolutely nothing to market them and I bet they don't have many distributors in the US or other Western countries (NewEgg sells their SSDs but I haven't seen them elsewhere).

    Seagate also has tons of capital to invest on the SSD market. Like in the case of this SSD, they didn't just go with stock SandForce but chose LAMD and invested on specializing the firmware. On top of that, I'm pretty sure Seagate has fairly big NAND deals with Toshiba and Samsung to ensure a steady supply of NAND, which requires capital. There have already been NAND shortages in the market and this year it will get even tougher - Seagate has an advantage because they can buy a ton of NAND whereas smaller players lack the capital for that (and the bigger client you are, the more important you are for the company so big clients are prioritized when there's a shortage).

    What would be a killer combination in the future is Seagate and Hynix combining their powers.
  • secretAgent! - Tuesday, May 7, 2013 - link

    WD is coming out soon with SSD PCIe cards soon.... i've helped test them.... shhhh....
  • StealthGhost - Wednesday, May 8, 2013 - link

    To me it was always just that HDDs are vastly different than SSDs. Making SSDs when you make HDDs is like starting from scratch almost. That is why the most random companies are making SSDs, because they made flash storage before. Corsair, OCZ, Crucial harddrives? I've owned RAM from all 3 but never a harddrive, but it makes sense for them to side step over from RAM to SSD, not so much for WD to go all the way down and then back up over to SSD.

    I hope WD becomes a big name in SSDs though, I have 5 WD harddrives that I can think of off the top of my head and one is from 2003. As you can tell, they're my favorite HDD manufacturer.
  • phillyry - Sunday, May 12, 2013 - link

    Cactusdog, "I don't understand why Seagate and WD were so slow in the SSD market."

    Because they didn't want to destroy their reputations with a the shenanigans that was going on in the first couple gens of SSDs. They wisely waited until the tech was mature so that their multibillion dollar reputations wouldn't go down the drain.
  • Tams80 - Tuesday, May 7, 2013 - link

    Same. I think around 500GB is the minimum I'd prepared to go with (for a laptop/mobile computer). They are still a bit too pricey and from my experience the hybrid drives, while good, aren't really worth it. 1TB would be great, but that will probably require waiting a few years.

    The 840 Pro looks to still be the best, but yes, it's still far too expensive for me. =(
  • klmccaughey - Tuesday, May 7, 2013 - link

    The 240GB non Pro 840 is pretty good unless you are doing a lot of writing - very well priced.

    I have a 2TB HD and a 256GB Steam drive. With Steam Tool / or caching software that is plenty. My C drive is 2 x 128GB Vertex 3's in Raid 0.

    Don't wait to switch! Just get what you can and add more when you can - you will never look back :)
  • MrSpadge - Tuesday, May 7, 2013 - link

    Yeah.. just make smart use of the space you've got and you should be able to get by with much smaller SSDs than 500 GB. Personally using 64 GB to cache my 3 TB HDD - fast enough for me :)
  • phillyry - Sunday, May 12, 2013 - link

    The OP is talking about a mobile computer (laptop), not a desktop solution where you can have additional hard drives.
  • creed3020 - Tuesday, May 7, 2013 - link

    Seagate may be late to the game but wow what an entrance! Going with the LM87800 almost guaranteed a strong performer as we already know from the Corsair Neutron's history. Their own special sauce added to the firmware shows that they are taking this market seriously.

    The HDD manufacturers, glorious duopoly and all, need to see the writing on the wall and get some products into this market vertical. There will be a need for spinning platters for years to come still as 4TB SSDs are still a good ways out.

    I'm currently on the fence for a Samsung 840 500GB but this announcement I need to wait and see how the reliability on these drives pans out as this may be the better choice.
  • Oxford Guy - Wednesday, May 8, 2013 - link

    MLC drives are generally going to be more reliable than TLC drives, unless you're dealing with firmware bugs (like the horribly buggy 1st generation Sandforce controller in the Vertex 2e)
  • name99 - Wednesday, May 8, 2013 - link

    "Seagate may be late to the game but wow what an entrance!"

    To me this is in the interesting point. Presumably Seagate are interested in surviving for more than the next five years. Which means they have to be in the broadly defined storage business, not just the HD business. Which in turn means: raises the question --- presumably they want to be the equivalent in the flash business of their role in the HD business?

    What would that take? If they were doing it seriously, it would take
    (a) own the controller. It seems they already own the firmware. Perhaps they don't care much about the LAMD/Hynix link because the next step is to design their own controller?
    (b) fab the flash. Until they do that, as has been said, they're just one of a dozen assemblers. Of course fabbing flash is not a completely trivial business to get into... So --- buy Hynix (or someone else)? Or not the whole company, but at least the flash division? I suspect we will see something like this.

    If they DO own the firmware, the chip, and the flash, they are at least in a rather better position.
    They can start to apply real engineering to these devices in a way we haven't yet seen, most obviously in much better power performance, both idle power and peak random writes power. There may also be scope for other innovations once you own the entire pipeline, for example you can tweak the flash being fabbed for a more precise set of specs, or you can drive it to tend to certain (known) failure modes which your firmware is set up to work around.
  • JellyRoll - Tuesday, May 7, 2013 - link

    Corsair recently released new versions of the Neutrons with a die shrink, are these Neutrons compared in the article with the new NAND?
  • Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, May 7, 2013 - link

    The units we have are all based on the older 24nm NAND. A while back I asked Corsair for review samples of the 128/256GB Neutrons (the original ones are 120/240) but they said they are not sampling them (yet). I can ask if they have changed their mind, although there shouldn't be much difference since 19nm Toshiba NAND has the same page/block/die size as 24nm.
  • FunBunny2 - Tuesday, May 7, 2013 - link

    Does "Toshiba" mean toggle-mode NAND, by definition? Or do they sell all types?
  • Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, May 8, 2013 - link

    Yes, Toshiba uses Toggle-Mode interface for their NAND. Here's the breakdown of NAND interfaces and manufacturers:

    Toggle-Mode: Toshiba/SanDisk (joint-venture) & Samsung
    ONFI: Intel/Micron (aka IMFT, also a joint-venture) & Hynix
  • LtGoonRush - Tuesday, May 7, 2013 - link

    HardOCP showed pretty significant performance increases, though that could also be due to the new firmware (which is not being back-ported as I understand).
  • romrunning - Tuesday, May 7, 2013 - link

    I really wish we had more tests of SSDs in RAID-5 arrays. This is really useful for SMBs who may not want/afford a SAN. I'm very curious to see if the 20% spare area affects SSDs just as much when they're RAIDed together as it does standalone. I also don't care of the SSDs are branded as being "enterprise" drives. It would be nice to see how a 5x256GB Samsung 840 Pro RAID-5 array would peform, or even a 5x400GB Seagate 600 Pro RAID-5 array.
  • FunBunny2 - Tuesday, May 7, 2013 - link

    No legitimate RDBMS vendor would allow its database on a RAID-5 machine. Never. Never. Never.
  • romrunning - Wednesday, May 8, 2013 - link

    I can't tell if you're just trolling or you're actually serious. Obviously, SMBs use RAID-5 arrays ALL the time, and they use "legitimate" database products like MS-SQL, etc. It doesn't have to be an IBM AIX server running DB2, or anything high-end.
  • daniel_mayes - Wednesday, May 8, 2013 - link

    What is FunBunny2 talking about? What Raid would you want to run them on 1,5,6,10, no ssd's?
    You aren't the only one that want's to see more tests with SSD's in a Raid 5. I would also like to see the destroyer run on ssd's with a higher provision and please add Intel DC S3700 to the destroyer benchmark next.
  • FunBunny2 - Wednesday, May 8, 2013 - link

    "I always have found that based on those requirements RAID 5 requires more spindles to satisfy those requirements than RAID 10 - and this has been found even with a Read/Write of 9:1. "

    here: http://sqlblog.com/blogs/linchi_shea/archive/2007/...
    (no, that's not me)

    Fact is, SSD still writes slower than reads, so what kind of RAID one uses matters. Having a 3NF (or higher) schema is a more productive avenue for performance on SSD, anyways, irregardless. Getting rid of all that bloated [un|de]normalized byte pile will allow, in most cases, you to have a much smaller database, and thus not worry about bunches and bunches of discs.
  • romrunning - Friday, May 10, 2013 - link

    That blog is from 2007, and SSDs weren't really in the picture at all. It has been demonstrated how SSDs can trump spinning disks in virtually all I/O-bound operations. The man in the blog even showed a test of RAID-5 beating RAID-10 on the same hardware, so his test was in direct contradiction to the one who later commented about spindles.

    That being said, I think you're trying to say that getting rid of unnecessary in your database will result in a smaller database & thus lower performance requirements. That might be true at one point, but when you've normalized your data already, then additional data will just make the database grow. After all, if you're writing something like electronic orders to your normalized database, it will grow based upon real data addition. That's why you need to make sure your storage array can handle the increased load.

    RAID-5 has been the best for SMBs because it provide the fault-tolerance and the higher utilization of total storage capacity that they want. That's why I would like to see tests of SSDs in RAID-5 arrays - to get Anandtech to test these great SSD performers in something I could use in a database server. Something like their tests of their own website databases would be nice, or even smaller ones using a 10-20GB database.
  • JDG1980 - Tuesday, May 7, 2013 - link

    Personally, I'd be reluctant to go with any brand except Intel and Samsung for SSDs. There have just been too many issues with the other vendors. Maybe Crucial's Marvell-based products, but absolutely not anything based on SandForce - they seem to have more reliability problems than all the other controllers put together.
  • Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, May 7, 2013 - link

    Well, Intel's current consumer-grade SSDs are all based on SandForce. In the beginning SandForce definitely had a ton of issues but keep in mind that the SF-2281 is a two-year-old controller - a lot has happened in that time.

    Then again, I agree that going with something non-SF is better choice because the pricing of SF SSDs isn't exceptionally good (e.g. Samsung SSD 840 is often the cheapest choice). I wouldn't rule out Plextor from the list of good candidates though.
  • DanNeely - Tuesday, May 7, 2013 - link

    Assuming no problems turn up in the next few months I'm probably going to buy a Crucial M500 - 1TB model. I've gone from a $280 120GB SSD to a $330 256GB one and filled both in about 18 months. Skipping the 500GB class entirely should let me go 3 or 4 years before running out of space while also giving enough flash capacity that I can pull my ~200GB of media onto my SSD. As an added bonus this will save ~$100 by allowing me to avoid a precautionary replacement the 5 year old HDD in my system. Overall it's an extra $150 upfront; but will avoid probably spending $300 in 2 years when I'd overflow the smaller SSD and having everything located on a single drive keeps things simpler to admin.
  • Oxford Guy - Wednesday, May 8, 2013 - link

    Not true. If you look at slickdeals you'll see SF drives for the same or less than the TLC 840 drives.
  • Shark321 - Tuesday, May 7, 2013 - link

    The Destroyer rocks! The first really meaningful SSD test for power users!
  • hp79 - Tuesday, May 7, 2013 - link

    For the Seagate 600, did they mistakenly swap the "idle power" usage (1.1W) with the "operating power" usage (0.75W) on the chart?
  • melgross - Tuesday, May 7, 2013 - link

    There's really no need for Seagate and WD to be first, or even early. Right now, HDD's are still the main storage component of the industry. Let them observe the mistakes made by others and come up with better products, as this one seems to be. They've got time.
  • James5mith - Tuesday, May 7, 2013 - link

    I would still love to see either the older "Optimus" series or the latest 2TB SAS series of SSD's from Smart put through the Anandtech wringer to see how they compare. If it's true that the new 2TB SAS drives are going to be $4000, that's $2/GB for enterprise grade MLC SAS ssds. That's something to take notice of.
  • rms - Tuesday, May 7, 2013 - link

    'indirection tablets' this phrase makes no sense to me; a typo? If not, please add an explanatory ellipsis for it!
  • MrSpadge - Tuesday, May 7, 2013 - link

    It should be "tables", not "tablets".
  • Jestre - Tuesday, May 7, 2013 - link

    2 requests:
    Can you incorporate the average power usage measured during the testing benchmarks, both "the Destroyer" and the 2011 benchmarks?
    It would be nice to see the actual realistic measured power consumption averages for worst case tests like this. You could also list an average power with a reasonable downtime calculated based on a typical usage pattern and the actual time to complete.

    Can you also list the time is take to complete these test for each drive,
    Thanks for all you good work.
    Jestre
  • Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, May 7, 2013 - link

    At least I don't have the hardware for measuring power consumption over time (all I have is a simple multimeter, unless it has features I'm not aware of). Anand might but I'm guessing not as I'm sure he would have taken advantage of it. The problem is that such hardware is not exactly cheap, so it's a rather big investment for only one test (I'd love to have one though).
  • lotharamious - Tuesday, May 7, 2013 - link

    Another wonderful SSD review, Anand. Well done!

    Since I started reading your site over 11 years ago your reviews have been really outstanding and particularly so with SSDs.

    I really love delving into the data presented, but you guys really need to get with the times on data plotting. Your charts can be somewhat confusing and downright frustrating to read.

    When showing scatter plots please include an option for plotting more statistics of the dataset, e.g. trendline about the mean, standard deviation, etc. It's really difficult to see just how well the 800 is gaining performance towards the end of the test run without a noticable trendline for your eyes to follow along the graph.

    In a chart, when displaying a line that corresponds to the unit that is currently being reviewed please draw that line ON TOP of the other references units' data lines. It's frustrating to try to compare the performance of different units when the one you really care about is blocked from view because the other 50 lines on the chart make a large enough noisy mess to not be able to tell right from left.

    And just for fun, I really wish you guys used a javascript plotting library for your reviews. It would be awesome if you could click on different graphics cards in a graph to see the percentage performance gain you would get between the card you clicked on and all the other cards in the graph. I've seen this kind of stuff on other sites, and it would be amazing to have here.

    Sorry for being so negative, because I still love reading this site every day. It's been incredible to see how you, the industry, and the drives themselves have morphed since 2008.

    Here's to many more great reviews!
  • mike55 - Tuesday, May 7, 2013 - link

    What causes the sharp drop in IOPS in the random write tests after so many minutes for SSDs? Is it because the drive has run out of empty blocks and is then doing read-modify-writes?
  • mike55 - Tuesday, May 7, 2013 - link

    Never mind, just realized my question was answered in the article.
  • HisDivineOrder - Tuesday, May 7, 2013 - link

    I imagine Seagate will tap its longterm partner, Samsung, to help it out with SSD controllers once LAMD is gone. Who did Samsung sell its hard drive business to? Seagate.

    Who did Seagate contract out for NAND from? Samsung.

    Seagate'll go back to Samsung once it's time for a new controller that can handle SATAe.
  • kyuu - Wednesday, May 8, 2013 - link

    While this is a decent drive, another source revealed that Seagate is trying to pull warranty shenanigans, limiting the warranty to 3 years OR 72 TB of writes (36 TB for the smaller drives), whichever comes first. Putting a "mileage" limit on the warranty is a first in the SSD space as far as I'm aware, and not something that should be supported. Definite pass on Seagate's SSDs unless and until they change their warranty terms.
  • Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, May 8, 2013 - link

    If you look at the warranty terms of other manufacturers, there is always a phrase that says warranty is invalidated if the SSD is operated outside of public specifications (and endurance is one one of them):

    Intel: "any Product which has been modified or operated outside of Intel’s publicly available
    specifications"

    http://download.intel.com/support/ssdc/hpssd/sb/1s...

    Crucial: "The above warranties cover only defects arising under normal use and do not include malfunctions or failures resulting from misuse, abuse, neglect, alteration, problems with electrical power, usage not in accordance with product instructions"

    http://www.crucial.com/company/termsofsale.aspx#li...

    OCZ: "Improper use of product, Normal wear and tear"

    http://ocz.com/consumer/support/warranty

    Or at least that's how I interpret their warranties. In a nutshell, warranty only covers failures which are results of defects in materials or assembly - it's clear that endurance is limited and hence exceeding the specification means that a failure may not have been due to a defect.
  • daniel_mayes - Wednesday, May 8, 2013 - link

    I would like to see consumer vs enterprise in a SMB server. Under a certain price point for example at $1,300 and lower you can get 3 x Intel 710 Series 100GB ($1,200), 5 x Intel DC S3700 100GB ($1,250), 4 x Seagate 600 Pro ($1,300), 5 x OCZ Vector 256 GB ($1,225), 5 x Corsair Neutron GTX 240 GB ($1,100), 5 x Samsung 840 Pro 256 GB ($1,200). Size doesn't matter as much as low latency and highest consistent performance. Since the consumer drives have more space over provision them at 25% and %50. That way we can see if more consumer ssd's at a higher provision rate are faster in a SMB environment than the enterprise drives. Yes I know the consumer ssd's will probably die faster but I'm sure most SMB's would rather pay half the cost of an enterprise drive and chance having to replace it twice as often.
  • Jestre - Wednesday, May 8, 2013 - link

    Kristian,
    is $59.95 with free shipping in your budget?
    See http://www.rc-electronics-usa.com/ammeters/dc-amp-...
    Not a sweet and an Agilent EPM power meter but it should do the trick at 3% of the price.
    Jestre .
  • Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, May 8, 2013 - link

    I need to speak with Anand but $60 definitely doesn't sound too bad :-) Ultimately I think a meter that could log data e.g. every 100ms and the data could easily be import to Excel would be ideal as then we could easily make a graph of power usage over time, but knowing the overall usage would still be better than what we have now. Thanks for the suggestion!
  • GamerGirl - Thursday, May 9, 2013 - link

    wow this is really so fast...19nm of nand its ok for longlife?
  • MelodyRamos47 - Sunday, May 12, 2013 - link

    before I saw the draft 4 $9944, I did not believe ...that...my mother in law was like they say actually erning money in their spare time at their laptop.. there aunt started doing this 4 only fifteen months and by now cleard the mortgage on there villa and bourt a great new Chrysler. we looked here, Jump44.comCHECK IT OUT
  • bards1888 - Monday, May 13, 2013 - link

    A local supplier has this part in stock, ST480FN0021. It does not appear to be the 600 Pro as it has part number ST480FP0021.

    Does anyone know the difference ?
  • vdidenko - Wednesday, May 29, 2013 - link

    I am known to fill up all storage available, so it will be hard to stick to the 10-20% free space rule for me. However, would partitioning the disk so that 20% of it is not allocated to a partition do the trick technologically? It surely will force me...
  • aSSDtech - Tuesday, July 2, 2013 - link

    I don't think 4 Tantulium Capacitors can make SSDs suvive upon sudden host power loss. 4*470uF can not meet the power of the SSD needs because the power comsumption is generally 4W and the data needs to be flushed down are more than 4 seconds because the DRAMs and the write speed.
  • RaresIonut - Wednesday, December 11, 2013 - link

    Hi,
    Very nice review!
    I ordered a Seagate s600 120GB and I should get it by tomorow.
    There's one thing that bothers me regarding ssd's (particulary mine): does the Seagate s600 120GB have TRIM support? Does it need TRIM support?
    Sorry if this was mentioned somewhere in the article, I'm reading iton a bus :(

    Thank you! :)
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  • Delicate - Monday, January 20, 2014 - link

    As per this article - http://www.techarena.in/review/258133-seagate-600-... in the Indian market this hard drive is way to costly which comes at Rs. 9000. Being a hard drive for extreme pc and gaming does not mean that it should be so much costly.

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