Seagate Unveils Fastest Ever Solid-State Disk

If you think your PC or laptop's SSD is fast, then Seagate has something that will most likely blow your mind. It has unveiled the fastest ever single SSD, which is capable of speeds up to 10GB/sec (10 gigabytes a second).

That's equivalent to 2,500 4MB Mp3 files or more than two large 4GB movie files every second. By comparison, most consumer SSDs can read data at a paltry half a gigabyte a second (500MB/sec), making Seagate's SSD 20 times faster. It's also 4GB/sec faster than the previous fastest SSD too.

The SSD also meets the OCP storage specifications standard being driven by Facebook , which will help reduce the power and cost burdens traditionally associated with with operating at this level of performance.

The production-ready unit makes use of 16-lane PCI- Express slots, which are present on most PC motherboards, although the device is mainly aimed at data centers - not your average PC. That said, Seagate claims it will work with any system that supports the NVMe standard - something that many modern PCs do offer.

Seagate has been keen to expand its business away from the traditional spinning platters of hard disks, which still offer price to storage ratios that are better even than cheap SSDs, but are much slower. It also purchased flash storage divisions from Avago, owned by Broadcom in 2014.  SSDs are falling in price all the time, and most high-end laptops and PCs include SSDs as their primary drives in favor of slower hard disks. Seagate's new SSDs will be on show at the Open Compute Project Summit 2016 in San Jose this week.