Seagate reveals world's fastest SSD, leaves previous top dog in the dust

Seagate NVMe SSD

Seagate is claiming the title of the world's fastest SSD, and says it has "rewritten the rules for performance" with a new drive which is now production-ready.

The NVMe SSD (the above image is Seagate's drawing of the demo unit) offers a blazing 10GBps, meaning it's way faster than the previous wearer of the solid-state speed crown which hit around 6GBps.

Seagate plans to release the drive at some point this summer and it meets Open Compute Project storage specifications, meaning it's cost-effective and efficient in terms of power usage, which is a big deal when bunging a load of these in a data centre.

Yes, this is an SSD aimed at hyperscale data centres who want top-notch performance, but still, it gives us a flavour of what's to come to the broader market in the future. While no pricing has yet been announced, you can expect this to cost a pretty penny.

Seagate notes that the firms which will benefit from the speed of this drive include large-scale cloud providers and those involved in the likes of weather modelling or crunching stats.

The 10GBps SSD will use 16-lane PCIe slots, but Seagate is also planning on producing a cut-down model for 8-lane PCIe slots that will provide a lesser performance (albeit still industry-leading) of 6.7GBps for those wanting to fork out a bit less.

Meanwhile, in the broader SSD picture, the gap between solid-state drives and traditional spinning disks is narrowing quickly.

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).