Seagate steps strongly into the solid-state market with four new SSDs

Seagate's involvement in solid-state storage market shifted into high gear today as the company unveiled four new drives: the Seagate 600 SSD, the Seagate 600 Pro SSD, the Seagate 1200 SSD, and the Seagate X8 Accelerator.

Among these new drives, the Seagate 600 SSD is the first from the storage vendor that's designed for general consumers; the rest are geared toward enterprise use.

The Seagate 600 SSD comes in both 7-millimeter and, for the first time among SSDs, 5-millimeter thicknesses. The drive retains the 2.5-inch laptop design, supports SATA 3 (6Gbps), and offers up to 80,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second) in random access and up to 500MBps in sequential access. It's available in 120GB, 240GB, and 480GB capacities.

The Seagate 600 Pro SSD is available only in the 7mm 2.5-inch design and also supports SATA 3. It's available in a wider range of capacities: 100GB, 120GB, 200GB, 240GB, 400GB, and 480GB. The drive is the first enterprise SSD from Seagate that supports the SATA interface standard rather than SAS. This means "pro-consumers" can also use it in their computers. The company claims it offers significantly faster performance and much greater write endurance than the 600 drive. (Read more about SSDs' write endurance here.)

The Seagate 1200 SSD is a next-generation SAS-based drive that supports the 12Gbps SAS standard. Seagate says the drive is 100 percent faster than the previous generation but is also backward-compatible with the 6Gbps SAS standard. The drive is available with as much as 800GB capacity and comes in either 1.8-inch or 2.5-inch size.

Finally, the Seagate X8 Accelerator SSD is a PCIe-based (PCI Express) drive that offers system-memory-like performance. The drive, powered by Virident, is said to offer up to 1.1 million IOPS and up to 2.2TB of storage space. The drive comes configured as an add-on card -- similar to a video card -- and uses an x8 PCI Express Gen-2 slot. It's designed specifically for servers to fulfill the maximum application performance requirement.

All of these new solid-state drives are available this month, but Seagate is still tight-lipped about their pricing. Check back soon for the full review of the Seagate 600 SSD.