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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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".