Seagate talks SSDs

By Sylvie Barak
10:25 Oct 13, 2008 | 5 Comments
Tags: SSDs

Out with the platter, in with the sexy solid state.

Not only will Seagate make the move to Solid State Drives (SSDs) in 2009, it may also make them its core business, replacing rotational hard disks as the company’s bestsellers.

Speaking to CNET, Seagate’s senior manager of market development, Rich Vignes, noted that the first step was to persuade people of the reliability of solid state drives by establishing an industry standard for endurance and life expectancy.

Once that mission is accomplished, Vignes is optimistic about SSD’s success, and the analysts seem to be on his side.

The company reckons it has enough experience to enter the SSD market due to its many years spent messing about with error correction.

Seagate will initially test the waters by flogging SSDs to the big fish, enterprise customers, before beginning to flood the consumer market.

But there are plenty more fish in the SSD sea, including Intel, which has already started shipping SSDs aimed at both consumers and enterprise (see our review in issue 94, on sale now!). Samsung is another big player in the consumer space, already selling its SSDs to Apple and Dell and having announced its SSDs have also been chosen by HP for its ProLiant blade servers.

But Vignes isn’t put off by the competition. "While for some companies, it's a new market and a new product, for us, it's an existing market, new product," he noted.

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5 Comments

smadge1 Oct 13, 2008 12:20 PM	"... it may also make them its core business, replacing rotational hard disks as the company’s bestsellers. " one can only hope!! Rotational disks will still be around for a while, at least while they're better value in the 1TB+ arena.
c0nc0n Oct 13, 2008 3:44 PM	I think we'll begin to see an adoption of 2 different types of HDDs in our PCs in the next 2 years. We will have people who have both SSDs and tradition platters, the SSD (128GB~) for the O/S and other commonly used files while the HDD (640GB+) will be used for backed up data, stuff that doesn't need ultra fast seek times games etc. We will also see people who have a heap of tradition SATA disks because they cannot find a cost effective solution to replace their multiple TBs of storage and they will not adopt SSDs for a few years because the amount of space offered per drive is still too small for many people.
AIMBOT Oct 13, 2008 5:37 PM	I would fully support this move if they were affordable. Until then however, I'm not interested.
lord-storm Oct 16, 2008 9:25 PM	Well I see their mass adoption with primarily the UNIX crowd. ZFS storage pool caches. Due to their low latency connections. Or naturally the OS partitions. The only problem is their lower expected life and ZFS is the only one that offers corruption protection so new measures will need to be put on the drives much like SMART. As with any desktop product Price is always an issue do most of us have Raptor drives NO but they are cheaper than what they were. Still most people will not buy them because of 1TB drives costing exactly the same. I am still doubtful that there is much cost/performance benefit including power consumption which is mostly hype. I wish that you could actually have more than 4 ranks of RAM that would provide more performance especially if the file system actually caches what you need it to. Why haven't we seen hybrid products yet? Vapor ware. Hopefully they RAID 0 the flash in chunks that perform best in desktop situations like VISTA fragmentation.
emccat Oct 18, 2008 9:49 PM	SSD are usually VERY expensive. (especially for laptops) giving SSD not to much PROS over the price. if i had to choose between a 64GB SSD for $200 or a 1TB/ 2 750GB HDD's for $200 i would go for the HDD any time. and dell is really ripping people of 1 laptop SSD 64GB there charging over $600.

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