Seagate's Barracuda SSD bares its teeth at PC, laptop upgraders

SATA flash drives to put low-cap disk on endangered list

Seagate has fired a new Barracuda SSD at the home server, PC and notebook disk replacement markets.

It's a 6Gbit/s SATA SSD in a 2.5-inch form factor, with capacities ranging from 250GB, through 500GB and 1TB, up to 2TB. The performance claims up to 90,000 random read IOPS, 540MB/sec sequential read and 520MB/sec sequential write. Seagate has not revealed random write IOPS.

These are on a par with Seagate's Nytro 141 SSD, introduced a year ago, with the same 6gig SATA interface, TLC (3bits/cell) 3D NAND and capacities up to 1TB.

We might assume Seagate's supplier has bumped up the 3D NAND layer count to double the capacity.

The Nytro 141 did up to 92,000/88,000 random read/write IOPS, which seems respectable enough and not much skewed in favour of reads over writes. We wouldn't expect the Barracuda SSD to be much different.

The drive can sustain up to 1,092TB written over its life and has a 5-year warranty. That equates to, we calculate, 0.6 drive writes per day (using 4 x 365 and 1 x 366 days/year) at the 2TB capacity level.

It has 1.8-million-hour mean time between failures, a useful increase on the Nytro 141's 1.5 million hours, and an ultra-low power mode.

Seagate's Barracuda brand now includes both disk drives and SSDs, with the Barracuda Pro disk drive capacities ranging from 2TB to 12TB.

Prices start at $79.99 (£74.99) for 250GB, going up to $249.99 (£229.99) for the 1TB. We have no dollar tag for the 2TB model but its UK price is set at £449.99.

Seagate said it will become generally available in September.

A fairly uninformative data sheet can be found here (PDF). ®