After years of making no more than a halfhearted effort, Seagate has finally shifted its involvement in the flash storage market up a notch, with the announcement of a class of four new Solid State Drives (SSDs), including the Seagate 600 SSD, Seagate 600 Pro SSD, Seagate 1200 SSD and the Seagate X8 Accelerator.

Most interesting is the Seagate 600 SSD, which Seagate says has been designed for general consumers, with the others being geared towards running enterprise applications.

The 600 SSD actually comes in two variations, measuring 5mm and 7mm in thickness respectively. Other specs include a 2.5-inch laptop design drive, SATA 3 support (6Gbps), up to 80,000 IOPS (input/output operations-per-second) in random access mode, plus 500 Mbps in sequential access. Buyers also have a choice of 120GB, 240 GB or 480 GB capacity.

As for the Seagate 600 Pro SSD, this represents the first enterprise SSD from the company that offers full support for the SATA interface, as opposed to its previous efforts that have only supported SAS. This model is only available in the one form factor, a 7mm 2.5-inch design that comes with SATA 3 support. However, it does come with a wider capacity range, with choices ranging from 100 GB , 120 GB, 200 GB, 240 GB, 400 GB and 480 GB. Crucially, the 600 Pro SSD’s SATA interface support means that power-consumers will also be able to use the drive inside their PCs, which should bring much faster performance and greater write endurance that the standard 600 SSD.

Moving up a notch, we have the Seagate 1200 SSD. Seagate bills this as a “next-generation SAS-based” drive featuring support for the new 12GB/s SAS standard. According to Seagate, the 1200 SSD is twice as fast as its predecessor, but at the same time it’s also backwards-compatible, meaning it supports the older 6 Gbps SAS standard as well. Targeted at enterprise users, the drive comes with up to 800 GB capacity, available in either a 1.8-inch or 2.5-inch form factor.

Finally, Seagate has lifted the lid on its X8 Accelerator SSD, which is a PCLe (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express) based flash drive, offering a level of performance equivalent to that of system memory. Powered by Virident, the drive boasts speeds of up to 1.1 million IOPS, plus a whopping 2.2 TB of storage capacity. It’s designed as a kind of add-on card, much like a video card, and compatible with the x8 PCI Express Gen-2 slot. Seagate says that the X8 Accelerator has been designed for maximum application performance on enterprise servers.