Seagate 600 SSD 480 GB in the test: the first SSD from the hard disk manufacturer

introduction

Traditional hard drive manufacturers have long been reluctant to use solid state drives and preferred to focus on their core competencies. For example, Seagate was initially content with launching flash memory in the form of hybrid drives such as the Momentus XT, in which a comparatively small amount of flash memory serves as a read cache for frequently used files in order to provide the appropriate ones Accelerate file access. After the first solid state drives for the enterprise market, such as the Pulsar XT.2, the company is now venturing with the Seagate 600 for the first time to an SSD for the consumer market. However, the cooperation with DensBits announced last June, with which Seagate strives to be the market leader in the long term, does not yet seem to be bearing fruit, because Seagate 600 relies on controller technology from Link_A_Media Devices (LAMD ), which have been taken over by Hynix.

Overview of the Seagate 600

When choosing suppliers for the first mainstream SSD, Seagate relied on Link_A_Media Devices and Toshiba. The LM87800 controller from LAMD originally comes from the enterprise sector, but is also used in the consumer segment in the Corsair Neutron GTX. It has two ARM cores, one of which is responsible for communication with the NAND chips and with the host side. As is currently the case, the LAMD controller also has eight memory channels, each of which can control up to four ONFi 2.3 NAND or toggle NAND chips. Like Corsair, Seagate has decided to use MLC-NAND with a toggle interface manufactured by Toshiba with a structure width of 19 nanometers and offers variants with 120, 240 and 480 GB storage capacity – each with a height of 5 or 7 millimeters. In addition to the controller, two 128 MB DDR2-800 modules from Micron are soldered as a cache, the 120 GB variant of the SSD could be just one module, analogous to the Neutron GTX.

The controller is connected via a thermal pad directly to the rather massive metal housing, which serves as a passive heat sink. The cover, on the other hand, is a relatively thin sheet that is attached to the housing with spring clips and cannot be removed without deforming the sheet.

On the next page: Test system & methodology