Ahead of Flash Memory Summit 2016, Seagate is launching a new NVMe add-in card. The Seagate Nytro XP7102 is designed to provide existing server designs storage with up to 2.5GB/s transfer speeds using a traditional PCIe 3.0 x4 slot. By utilizing a half-height, half-length design the company is able to target even compact 1U and 2U server designs and slots that are empty in those servers.
The pictures we received of the new card are utilizing a Marvell controller with Micron NAND and DRAM and we have seen versions with both full height and low profile brackets.
Key specs are read speeds of 2,500 MB/s with write speeds of 900MB/s. 70/30 mixed workload IOPS are rated at 110K.
Seagate told us that these cards will be available at launch. We hope to get one to test in the near future as the majority of the servers we are building now have PCIe/ NVMe SSDs. There is still a large market of servers that are using slower SSDs or hard drives that can benefit from a SSD cache device. The endurance on these drives is rated at 3 DWPD in both the 800GB and 1.6TB capacities.
Here are the key specs from Seagate’s website on the new cards (click to expand):
With the 5-year warranty and a 2 million hour MTBF it is likely that a majority of these drives will outlast servers that they are installed in. We also would note that the power consumption is well below some of the higher performance NVMe SSDs we have seen with maximum power consumption of 11.5w.
Overall, more options in the PCIe and NVMe space are welcome. 2016 will see an expansion in terms of NVMe devices on the market as well as with capacities. We will start to see releases such as the Seagate Nytro XP7102 become more common where lower capacity points (e.g. the 400-512GB capacity range) will be omitted.
