Seagate 600 SSD (240GB): A decent first effort, but not good enough

Seagate has so far been a mechanical hard drive player, but last year at Computex, Seagate introduced its first consumer series of SSDs. While Seagate already has the hybrid drives portfolio where it bundles a small amount of flash memory with spinning drive, the SSD lineup is a big step up, considering this is an already crowded market. We got our hands on the Seagate 600 SSD coming with a 240GB capacity, and were eager to put it through the paces.   Build and Features Seagate 600 SSD has a minimalist design coming in a black coloured metallic body with a white wavy design on the front along with the Seagate branding. It comes with a 7mm z-height which is enough to fit it into a laptop and it weighs just about 77 grams. [caption id=“attachment_217772” align=“aligncenter” width=“652”]  Comes in 120GB. 240GB and 480GB capacities in 7mm and 5mm z-height configurations[/caption] Seagate’s SSD lineup includes three broad categories - 600 series, 600 Pro series and the 1200 series. Each one coming in different capacities with 480GB being the maximum for the 600 and 600 Pro series, whereas 800GB being the maximum for 1200 series which is meant for enterprise use. Even within the 600 series, you have demarcations based on the z-height - you have both the 7mm and the 5mm form factor SSDs. [caption id=“attachment_217770” align=“aligncenter” width=“600”]  The Seagate 600 SSD in the 240GB capacity comes with 8x Toshiba NAND modules and LAMD LM87800AA SSD controller[/caption] The Seagate 600 series SSD 240GB  is meant for consumers and on opening up the SSD, you will find a Link-A-Media LM87800AA controller along with 8x Toshiba NAND memory chips (19nm, Toggle-mode MLC NAND). LAMD LM87800 is an 8-channel controller and it was last seen on the **Corsair Neutron series SSDs** . You also have two 128 MB Micron DDR2-667 DRAM for caching. It comes in a 2.5-inch form factor and has a SATA 6 Gbps interface.   Test Setup Processor: Intel Core i7-4770K Motherboard: ASRock Z87M Extreme4 RAM: 2 x 4GB GSkill RipjawsX OS Drive: Intel SSD, 80GB PSU: Cooler Master 800W Silent Pro Gold OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit   Performance Crystal Disk Mark 3.0 Crystal Disk Mark allows you to find out sequential as well as random read and write speeds. We kept it on the default mode which uses random data. It also gives you the option to perform sequential and random read and write tests 4KB, 512KB and 4KB with queue depth of 32 data.    ATTO Benchmark This is the most popular storage benchmarking tool and allow you to check read and write speeds across various transfer sizes and queue depths. ATTO is also a good tool to check for the marketing spiel of SSD makers where they publish sequential read and write speeds on the packaging.       Seagate 600 SSD gives a maximum sequential read speed of 554 MB/s and sequential write speed of 468 MB/s which is around its advertised numbers. These numbers are faster only than the Plextor M5 Pro Xtreme drive.   AS SSD AS SSD is a benchmark tool built specifically for SSDs which uses incompressible data and calculates sequential and random read and write speeds and gives an overall score at the end. It also gives you the input/output operations per second or IOPS for each of those tests which is interesting. Apart from this you can also perform Copy Test where it creates test folders for large files simulating ISO, programs and games and measures the transfer speeds and duration.      In the AS SSD benchmark, the Seagate drive was behind all other drives, but in terms of IOPS it shows good numbers. It is marginally better than the Samsung 840 Pro when it comes to 4K QD64 Read IOPS. The IOPS numbers are around the same as advertised by Seagate.   PC Mark 7 PC Mark 7 is a complete PC benchmarking solution for Windows 7 having a dedicated Storage test module. It is a collection of workloads that isolate the performance of your PC’s SSD. The Secondary Storage test allows you to test drives other than your system drive. It simulates operations such as importing pictures, gaming, starting applications and so on.    Anvil Storage Utilities Anvil Storage utilities is another versatile SSD benchmark tool which besides having an in-built SSD tool, also allows you the option to tweak the settings. Just like the AS SSD benchmark, you get a read, write and an overall score. The tables are more in-depth as it gives you response time, IOPS, MB read/written and finally the transfer speeds in MB/s. You can perform threaded I/O read and write tests where you can adjust block size as well as the queue depth. We ran the SSD test using 100 per cent incompressible and 46 per cent compression.

  In the Anvil test again, we notice that the Seagate drive is true to its IOPS numbers at 100 per cent incompressible data. For higher queue depths, you get more IOPS. Overall score however, is less than that of the other SSDs.   Verdict and Price in India The Seagate 600 series SSD comes at an MRP of Rs 17,500 which comes to around Rs 78.1 per GB. This is lower than the Plextor M5 Pro Xtreme, but the Samsung 840 Pro as well as the Corsair Neutron GTX selling at Rs 16,000 offer better performance and better value. So naturally, we find it hard to recommend the Seagate 600 series SSD over the Samsung 840 Pro or the Corsair Neutron GTX SSD. A quick online search on Indian e-tailing sites, quotes the price of the Seagate 600 SSD around Rs 13,000, which is decent pricing if you are willing to look beyond the relative performance hit. But we would still suggest you spend a little more and go for the Samsung 840 Pro.