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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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 .