Seagate 1200 400GB SAS Enterprise SSD Review

 

 

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Review:
Seagate 1200

Reviewed
by:
J.Reynolds

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Provided
by: Seagate

Firmware
version:
04

 

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Welcome to
Myce’s belated review of the Seagate 1200 400GB SAS Enterprise SSD (hereafter
referred to as the Seagate 1200).

Belated,
especially as the Seagate 1200 has recently been succeeded by the 1200.2 (which
we hope to review soon).

There were a
number of reasons for the delay.

Firstly, the sample drive that was sent to Myce came with an
early version of the firmware (01), which I found problems with.  My thanks to
Seagate for sorting this out (especially to Andy Beckwith) and updating the
firmware level to 04.

Secondly, the
problems were with me.

Suffice to say I am now able to bring you the review using a
recent version of the OakGate system, which now includes OakGate’s native 12
Gbit/sec driver.  I am keen to put the review into our catalogue of enterprise
reviews, even if it is late, as the Seagate 1200 is an important drive from a
big player in the enterprise storage market.

Another advantage of performing this review belatedly is that
the Seagate 1200 could be subjected to Myce’s comprehensive power consumption
testing procedures, as announced here,
and the Seagate 1200 gives us our first set of results for an SAS drive.

I will now take
this opportunity to show you a couple of the new features of our OakGate
system:

Firstly, the
upgraded Dashboard capability, which enables one to monitor in flight
performance -

Here we see
the Seagate 1200 performing mixed 4K random Reads/Writes (70% Reads, 30%
Writes).


Secondly, the
Peripheral Control screen, together with a display of the drive’s in flight
power consumption being taken from the integrated Quarch hardware.

 

Market Positioning and
Specification

Market
Positioning

This is how Seagate
positions the Seagate 1200 series of drives –

 

Specification

Here is Seagate’s
specification for the Seagate 1200 series –

Product
Image

Here is a
picture of the Seagate 1200 that I tested –

 

The Seagate 1200 uses a Marvell controller with Seagate’s
proprietary firmware, 21nm eMLC NAND manufactured by Samsung, and has a robust
all metal case that feels as if it is built to last.


Now let's
head to the next page, to look at Myce’s Enterprise Testing Methodology.....

 

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