In spite of the fact that the market of solid state drives still represents a small fraction of the market, Seagate, the world’s largest maker of hard disk drives plans to spend at least $100 million to develop both reliable and cost-efficient solution.

“We'd love to have an SSD range, that's why we're investing (as much as $100 million), as there are a lot of things that we like about them. But there are also some problems,” said William Watkins, chief executive officer of Seagate, reports Pocket-lint web-site.

But since SSDs are much more expensive than HDDs, many expect incredible tangible performance improvements from the former type of storage devices as well as serious reliability levels.

On the other hand, demands from different markets are different, for example, the market of consumer-oriented devices is accelerating, whereas the enterprise markets demand maximum reliability in addition to performance.

“The world has changed. In 1999, for example, we saw massive spending on storage by businesses worried about the Millennium Effect. Now homes are being flooded with content, such as HD movies and photographs, and all of this requires lots of storage. We now sell more storage into homes than we do into the enterprise arena,” Mr. Watkins said.

Tags: Seagate, SSD, Flash