X-bit labs

Seagate Plans to Manufacture Solid-State Drives.

Category: Storage

by Anton Shilov

[ 08/23/2007 | 10:45 PM ]

Even though flash-based solid state drives (SSDs) do not offer capacities common for magnetic media-based hard disk drives (HDDs), the SSD market is growing pretty rapidly and has all chances to represent a significant amount of devices in the coming years. In order to follow the trends, Seagate Technology, market leader of the hard drive industry, said it would produce SSDs going forward.

“We are going to have a solid state drive, probably for enterprise first. We think we can make these drives better,” said Bill Watkins, chief executive of Seagate Technology, in an interview, reports Cnet News.com.

Since solid state drives use only chips and no moving mechanisms, flash-based SSDs are considerably faster and more reliable compared to traditional hard disk drives that use rotating media, moving heads and so on. Unfortunately, nowadays solid state drives are tangibly more expensive in terms of cost per gigabyte compared to HDDs. But while it is hardly possible to store all the data on SSDs, it is possible to combine usage of traditional hard drives and flash-based drives to keep mission-critical data safe on SSD, enjoy high-performance of SSD in certain cases and still being able to store hundreds of gigabytes of data on an HDD.

Seagate does not believe that solid state drives will replace hard disk drives in foreseeable future, however, it expects SSDs to account for 7% of PC storage market in the coming years. Seagate believes that it is capable of offering competitive SSDs thanks to its expertise in making hard drives and will be able to fight for those 7% of the market too.

“The storage component – flash chips or magnetic platters – are only one component of a drive. There are also chips, boards and lots of software. Hard drive has a million lines of code in it. The million lines of code make it a solution,” said Mr. Watkins.

Seagate Technology these days is looking forward a flash supplier for its future SSD products, hence, there is currently no information about solid state drives lineup from Seagate.