Samsung Electronics, the world's largest maker of flash memory, and Seagate Technologies, a leading supplier of enterprise-grade hard disk drives (HDDs), on Thursday said that they had entered into a joint development of controllers for enterprise-grade solid-state drives (SSDs). This is the second enterprise SSD-related agreement that Seagate signed in 2010.

“Today’s agreement with Samsung will help us bring a compelling set of SSD innovations to the enterprise storage market, with benefits that range from enhanced performance, endurance and reliability to cost and capacity improvements. This agreement with Samsung strengthens our SSD solutions strategy, and positions Seagate well as global demand for storage continues on its strong growth path,” said Steve Luczo, Seagate chairman, president and chief executive officer.  

Under the agreement, the two companies will jointly develop and cross-license related controller technologies for SSD storage devices to attain the high levels of performance, reliability and endurance demanded by enterprise storage applications. The joint development effort builds on the existing SSD capabilities of each company while combining Seagate’s leadership in enterprise storage technology with Samsung’s flash memory technology specific to 30nm-class MLC NAND.  The jointly developed controller will be utilized in Seagate’s enterprise-class SSDs. Probably, Seagate will have to exclusively use multi-level cell (MLC) flash memory from Samsung inside those drives.

”We are pleased to be jointly developing a high-performance SSD controller with Seagate for the enterprise storage market," said Changhyun Kim, senior vice president and Samsung fellow of memory product planning & application engineering.

The fact that Seagate as well as Intel Corp. and a number of other makers decided to use MLC NAND flash memory inside their enterprise-grade solid state drives clearly points out that the manufacturers believe that advanced SSD controllers are capable of dramatically improving reliability of MLC-based SSDs.

Earlier this year Seagate teamed up with LSI for PCI Express-based enterprise-grade SSDs. Under the agreement LSI created solid-state storage (SSS) solution 6200 for PCI Express x4 interface that could integrate up to six Seagate Pulsar solid-state drives that are designed for Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interconnection.

Tags: Seagate, Samsung, SSD, Flash