Seagate Nytro 5050 - 15mm, U.2

The Seagate Nytro 5050-series launch is a little confusing, with the extent of the portfolio surpassing nearly 150 parts. It probably would be a little more helpful for Seagate to better define the swimlanes for each model to reduce confusion. The end result is highly fragmented, with overlapping drives and configurations offered. Beyond the overwhelming SKU list, we have a hard time imagining how Seagate plans to support this entire family for the next five or more years. The cost to maintain inventory, support matrixes, and other background information for each individual drive is immense. Drive family marketing decisions aside, Seagate made a critical strategic decision to leverage Phison’s controller to deliver an enterprise NVMe SSD to battle Samsung, Solidigm, Kioxia, Micron, and others. Unfortunately for Seagate, the decision to put so many eggs in this particular Phison basket didn’t work out. As a reminder, this is the first mass-market enterprise SSD controller Phison has brought to market. In this review, all of the comps are 1 DWPD NVMe SSDs, as that’s what makes up the vast majority of enterprise SSDs shipped. Seagate sent us their 3 DWPD model, which should have a performance advantage over 1 DWPD comps. With that advantage, we saw the Nytro 5550H slip in our application workload covering a MySQL Sysbench scenario. In our synthetic tests, read performance came through quite strong, nearly matching the Dapustor R5100 at the top of the pack. That advantage though started to waiver as the workloads started to skew more towards write activity, or mixed read/write activity. That said, is there a silver lining? Only if the drives are extremely inexpensive. In that case, they’ll be fine for many mainstream enterprise applications, where cost and power consumption may trump overall performance. In a market with so many excellent options, we expect Seagate to find very tough sledding with the latest Nytro family.