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.
