For the current SATA-standard drives, Seagate offers a regular and Pro version, the latter adding in a little more endurance thanks to higher-grade NAND stock and the use of higher over-provisioning. We tested the standard 600 SSD in its 480GB capacity. Also see: What’s the best SSD Following Corsair’s lead and its Neutron GTX SSD (tinyurl.com/kv954fc), Seagate has plumped for a controller from a relative newcomer in such technology, Link A Media Devices, also known as LAMD. In fact, the Seagate 600 SSD uses the same LM87800 chip as Corsair, but different firmware means results could be different. With 555MB/s reading from the ATTO benchmark, the Seagate 600 SSD isn’t troubled by large sequential reads. Its sequential write is a little lower than some of the competition, though, at 458MB/s, where most get closer to 500MB/s. That’s the lowest of this group. As we found with Corsair’s implementation, the LAMD controller doesn’t employ data compression techniques to inflate performance figures. Looking at the CrystalDiskMark results for 0x00 and random data, we get broadly the same results in sequential testing, 495- and 502MB/s for reads, and 458- and 462MB/s writes. Looking at small-file transfer characteristics, the Seagate 600 SSD behaved reasonably well with single-threaded 4kB data, hitting 28MB/s for reads and 78MB/s for writes. As queue depth is increased the Seagate scales well, nudging 97k IOPS for reads with 32 threads and 8k IOPS for writes, although the performance tails off. The Seagate 600 SSD is a good value, but high-performance solid?state drive. Now over one year old, it’s available at very competitive prices, which work out at a very reasonable 42p per gigabyte for the larger-capacity 480GB capacity model.
