Almost everyone expected it to eventually happen.
Around this time last year, Seagate released their Nytro 141 SATA SSD’s. Their direction back then was to focus primarily on Enterprise customers. The Nytro 141 was released with limited availability for only specific customers. Although this product was more for Data Center applications, it was only a matter of time before they would go full blast with truly consumer-level SSD’s (which is what their main competitor, Western Digital + SanDisk has been doing). The last time a consumer SSD was released by Seagate was back in 2013 with their 600 and 600 Pro series.
Today, it was announced that Seagate will be releasing their new BarraCuda SSD for mainstream consumers – a departure from their previous directions to push mainly HDD and SSHD solutions.
Their main offering is a 2.5-inch drive with sequential speeds of up to 540 Mb/s and 90K IOPS, with capacities from 250GB to 2TB. Specifications below:
- Form Factor: 6 Gbps SATA, 2.5″
- Sequential Read: up to 540 MB/s
- Sequential Write: up to 520 MB/s
- Random Read IOPS: 90K IOPS
- Random Write IOPS: Unspecified
- Warranty: 5 years
- MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure): 1.8M hours
Price:
- 250GB – $75 (~Php 3,975)
- 500GB – $120 (~Php 6,360)
- 1TB – $230 (~Php 12,190)
No word yet on the controller used yet, but from pricing indication it seems like Seagate has quite an expensive product here. According to some inside sources, these drives will be available locally before September 2018.