Seagate has stirred up the SSD market today with the introduction of its first solid state disk, the Pulsar series.

These drives are aimed at the Enterprise market segment and use SLC (Single-Level Cell) technology. Seagate's press release states performance numbers of up to 30,000 read IOPS and 25,000 write IOPS, 240MB/s sequential read and 200 MB/s sequential write rates.

While at this stage the Pulsar series is only meant for OEMs, by the end of Q1 2010 drives should be seen circulating in retail channels. But what's most exciting is that now Seagate has landed in the SSD realm and got the ball rolling, so we should start to see many more and exciting SSD models from them in the not too distant future, both at the Enterprise and general consumer levels.

You can find Seagate's official announcement on the new Pulsar series here. Further to that is an introductory article to Pulsar put together by our own Sean Kalinich who was able to get a full briefing from Seagate about these new SSDs; entitled "Seagate light up the Enterprise SSD sky with Pulsar".

Also, in our State of Solid State - Chapter II article we published earlier today, Chris had managed to get in touch with Seagate's Senior PR Manager responsible for enterprise storage, David Szabados and has a bunch of interesting questions answered on this page relating to Pulsar and beyond.