The Seagate 600 & 600 Pro SSD Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on May 7, 2013 8:00 AM ESTThe Seagate 600/600 Pro
Both the Seagate 600 and 600 Pro are 2.5” SATA drives. Their enclosures are completely screw-less, which makes getting in a bit of a pain but it’s not impossible. The 600 is available in 7mm and 5mm thicknesses, the latter is something we’ve only recently seen with Western Digital’s UltraSlim drive announcement. The 600 Pro is only available in a 7mm form factor.
Seagate 600 (left) vs. Seagate 600 Pro (right)
All 600/600 Pro designs that I’ve seen thus far use single-sided PCBs and 8 NAND devices. Seagate simply varies the number of NAND die per package to hit various capacity points.
Seagate 600
The Seagate 600 is available in 120GB, 240GB and 480GB capacities using 128GB, 256GB and 512GB of NAND, respectively. All of those drives have 8 NAND devices, and 2, 4 and 8 19nm NAND die per package, respectively.
480GB Seagate 600
480GB Seagate 600 (back)
The 600 Pro is available in the same capacities, but adds 100GB, 200GB and 400GB versions as well. The 200/400GB 600 Pros have 128/256/512GB of NAND, but are over provisioned to give the controller more spare area to work with. I like the idea of setting aside more spare area for the Pro drive, but the fact that not all 600 Pros are configured this way is bound to be confusing to customers.
Seagate 600 Pro
Other than the availability of heavily over provisioned drives, the 600 Pro also separates itself from the client-focused Seagate 600 by including an array of capacitors for power loss protection. In the event of unexpected power loss Seagate expects the 600 Pro will be able to commit all data received by the LM8780 controller to NAND.
400GB Seagate 600 Pro
The 600 carries a 3 year warranty and is rated for up to 40GB of writes per day throughout that warranty period (the 120GB model is rated for 20GB of writes per day). The 600 Pro uses better binned NAND and boasts higher endurance over the course of its longer 5 year warranty. As is typically the case with SSDs, endurance tends not to be an issue for client usage - in the enterprise whether or not you can get by with the 600 or need the 600 Pro really depends on your workload.
Seagate isn’t announcing pricing other than to say that the 600/600 Pro will be priced inline with competing drives.
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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 .