The Seagate 600 & 600 Pro SSD Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on May 7, 2013 8:00 AM ESTFinal Words
It's really good to see another SSD maker recognize the value of Link A Media's controller architecture and use it. Seagate's 600 SSD is a great drive, particularly thanks to how well it performs in a full drive scenario. The 600/600 Pro's peak performance is good, but combine it with great worst case scenario performance and you have the makings of a very good drive.
For client users I see no reason to consider the 600 Pro over the 600. If you need the power fail protection then the 600 Pro is your only option. Similarly if you need more endurance, the 600 Pro makes sense there as well. For everyone else, the 600 should do very well (in fact, it'll likely perform more consistently than many other drives I've seen branded as enterprise solutions).
There are two downsides to Seagate's 600/600 Pro: 1) idle power consumption and 2) no hardware encryption support. The first can be a deal breaker for notebook users. Unfortunately here Seagate is at the mercy of Link A Media. The LM87800 controller seems to have enterprise beginnings, where idle power just doesn't matter as much. Power consumption under load is great, but high idle power draw can really hurt in many light workload mobile applications. Desktop users won't be impacted. The lack of hardware encryption support and support for Microsoft's eDrive standard is less of an issue, but it's hard to not want those things after seeing what Crucial's M500 can do.
Long term I do wonder what will happen to the Seagate/LAMD relationship. Link A Media is now owned by Hynix, and last I heard Hynix didn't want drive makers using LAMD controllers without Hynix NAND. Obviously the 600/600 Pro were in development since before the acquisition so I wouldn't expect to see any issues here, but I get the impression that the successor to these drives won't be based on a Link A Media controller. It's no skin off of the 600's back for its successor to go a different route, but I worry that the best feature of the 600 may get lost in the process. What makes the 600 great is its balance of high peak performance with solid minimum performance. Performance consistency isn't as good as on Corsair's Neutron (another LM87800 drive) but it's far better than a lot of the drives on the market today. Ultimately what this means is you can use more of the Seagate 600's capacity than you could on other drives without performance suffering considerably. I usually recommend keeping around 20% of your drive free in order to improve IO consistency, but with LAMD based drives I'm actually ok shrinking that recommendation to 10% or below. There are obviously benefits if you keep more free space on your drive, but Seagate's 600 doesn't need the spare area as badly as others - and this is what I like most about the 600.
Of course the usual caveats apply. Although the LM87800 is a fairly well understood controller by this point, I'd still like to see how Seagate's validation and testing have done before broadly recommending the drive. I would assume the 600/600 Pro have been well tested given Seagate's experience in the HDD industry, but when it comes to SSDs I've learned to never take anything for granted. There's also the question of how regularly/quickly we should expect to see firmware updates for these drives, should issues arise. Again, I feel like Seagate will be better here than most first timers in the SSD market but these are all caveats I've applied in the past when dealing with a relative newcomer.
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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.