It is generally acknowledged that solid state hard drives offer a performance boost to computing speed, but the additional cost and limited capacity has prevented  widespread uptake. Seagate says a new hybrid drive technology it has developed offers a solution that provides  a 3X increase in random performance over existing solutions.

The Seagate Enterprise Turbo SSHD is described as  solid state hybrid drive (SSHD), combining the capacity of a hard drive with solid-state flash.
 
Seagate says it provides up to a 3X increase in random performance over existing 15K-RPM drives and is available with up to 600GB of capacity.

“Typically the most demanding mission critical applications for 15K drives have improved performance by compromising on capacity and cost per GB,” said Rocky Pimentel, Seagate executive vice president and chief sales and marketing officer.

“With the Enterprise Turbo SSHD, we deliver a no compromise drive that provides high-speed performance while enabling customers to leverage all of Turbo’s capacity. The result, a combination of performance and capacity that we believe represents a new paradigm shift for mission critical, enterprise storage— a real game changer in storage solutions now and for generations to come.”

The first enterprise SSHD has been introduced as an option for the IBM System x servers.

Based on preliminary performance testing using standard system benchmarking tools, Seagate says a 10K-RPM version of enterprise SSHD boasts IOPS over 2X better than a standard 600GB 10K-RPM hard disk drive.

Additional information on the Seagate Enterprise Turbo SSHD can be found by visiting www.seagate.com/www/turbo.