Seagate turns to NVMe to amp up IronWolf 510 SSD speed

Slow SATA no longer cuts it for SSDs in Seagate’s IronWolf NAS systems, with the company announcing the much faster NVMe IronWolf 510 SSD.

Seagate launched the SATA IronWolf 110 SSD in January last year. This uses a 2.5-inch form factor to provide a capacity range of 240GB to 3.84TB. The Ironwolf 510 is a reduced capacity range in the smaller and faster M.2 2280 gumstick format. When single-sided, it has 240GB and 480GB capacities, rising to 960GB and 1.92TB in a double-sided product.

Seagate’s Matt Rutledge, SVP, devices, issued a quote: “We are the first to provide a purpose-built M.2 NVMe for NAS that not only goes beyond SATA performance metrics but also provides 3x the endurance when compared to the competition.”

He could be thinking of drives such as Samsung’s M.2 format 970 EVO which has up to 1.2TB written rating at a 2TB capacity – about three times less than the IronWolf 510.

Seagate rates the IronWolf 510 at one drive write per day for its five-year warranty period. This is equivalent to 3.15PB for the 1.92TB model – which is lower than the IronWolf’s 110’s 3.5PB for the same capacity.

The need for speed

The 510’s read performance is on another planet compared with the SATA IronWolf 110, and sequential write numbers are also elevated.

The IronWolf 110 performs up to to 90,000/20,000 random read/write IOPS. The 510 is more than four times faster at reading, delivering up to 380,000/28,000 random read/write IOPS.

Sequentially, the 110 provides up to 560/535MB/sec bandwidth, which the 510 blows away with its 3,150/1,000 MGB/sec. This delivers a 5.6x read speed increase and a 1.4x write speed boost.

Seagate positions the 510 as best suited for use as a cache tier in front of IronWolf disk drives in a NAS system.

The IronWolf 510 has 1.8 million hours between failure rating and comes with two years of Rescue Data Services to restore data from a failed drive.

It’s available now and retails at $119.99 for the 240GB, $169.99 for 480GB, $319.99 for 960GB; and $539.99 for 1.92TB.