The Seagate 600 & 600 Pro SSD Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on May 7, 2013 8:00 AM ESTPerformance vs. Transfer Size
ATTO is a useful tool for quickly measuring the impact of transfer size on performance. You can get the complete data set in Bench. I pointed this out earlier but we see much better low queue depth sequential performance than on the Corsair drives, despite using the same controller (and presumably somewhat similar firmware). It's now very clear to me that Seagate had some degree of say in what happened at the firmware level on these drives.
Samsung maintains the best curve in these tests however. On the write side, the 120GB 600 is the only drive that tops out early.
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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".