Scotts Valley (CA) – The world’s dominant hard drive manufacturer will begin offering flash-based solid state disk (SSD) drives next year. Seagate told Cnet that the drives will be offered to enterprise customers first, while consumer drives will be sold “later.”

Seagate is one of the last hard drive manufacturers not to offer SSDs and is the last large hard drive manufacturer not to offer a hard drive that can compete with SSDs in terms of performance. The company repeatedly said that it would offer its first SSDs in 2008 and it now appears that the timeline has slipped into 2009.

In a conversation with Cnet, senior manager of market development Rich Vignes said that the manufacture is planning to introduce enterprise SSDs in 2009. "Our history is based on rotating magnetic media. But as solid-state comes online, we're embracing this new media type."

This statement may be a bit misleading, as Seagate does not really have a choice. SSDs are moving into the mainstream and the company has a clear disadvantage in this market at this time. As of now, the company has not announced any intentions to manufacture NAND flash by itself and virtually all major HDD competitors of the company (exception: WD, which offers a speedy hard drive as SSD alternative, and Hitachi) are among a group of the world’s largest NAND flash manufacturers.  In addition, there is a range of new competitors, most importantly Intel, that are offering SSDs and aren’t likely to settle for second place by default.

While SSDs are still expensive, 64 GB media have just undercut the $200 mark in U.S. retail and are moving into the mainstream with big steps. Samsung, Micron and Toshiba will begin selling 256 GB drives later this year and especially Samsung maintains that SSDs will become mainstream in 2009. If Samsung is right, Seagate may be a bit late to the party, as Vignes told Cnet that consumer drives will follow enterprise drives and decided not to mention a release date for such drives yet. Seagate traditionally follows mainstream demand with its product releases.

Seagate’s flash strategy so far has been limited to hybrid (flash/HDD) hard drives, which have been positioned as power-saving options to 2.5” models and currently sell with a premium of about 25% over traditional Seagate hard drives with the same capacity and form factor.

Vignes indicated that a main battlefield for SSD adoption will be convincing enterprise customers that SSDs are reliable. Typically, SSD manufacturers claim that SSDs have several times the expected meantime between failure (MTBF) of traditional hard drives (usually in the 1 – 1.5 million hour range) and state that SSDs have the advantage that they do not surrender data when they fail.

This is all great but.....

Oct 10, 2008 12:34     

Until the drives come down in price and increase in capacity SSD drives will still be in limited number of systems.
ThomFrost report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +5

when the price drops

Oct 10, 2008 14:30     

When the prices drops on the SSD's, then they will become more competitive with HDD's. Till then, it is still too expensive for most users.
TomLeeM/BigWarpGuy report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +1

they do not surrender data when they fail.

Oct 10, 2008 15:03     

"and state that SSDs have the advantage that they do not surrender data when they fail." Does that mean they hold onto data which could be recovered??
WTF report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +3

nah, the SSDs send a representative out to deal wit...

Oct 10, 2008 16:23     

nah, the SSDs send a representative out to deal with you and negotiate terms before they release your data. Under a white flag of course. Speedy Gonzalez voice, "So Senor... how much ees your data worth to you, eh?"
MorituriMax report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +5

Great, you ll need more processing power to keep up

Oct 10, 2008 19:40     

awesome!
Francois report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

Re: ThomFrost

Oct 12, 2008 08:24     

As companies buy new laptops / computers for they're workers they should all move into SSDs: 1 - Capacity is (in 99% of the cases) not an issue. I have no idea how much space I still have left on mine (never cared and never will - but I'd guess its a 40Gb HDD) but even 32Gb is more than enough for most professional uses. 2 - Prices of 32Gb are already affordable. Next year, 32Gb and 64Gb should be mainstream easily, I'd even say 128Gb as well but probably on 2009H2. 3 - Yes there will be faster SSDs, but again, for companies this is, for most cases, not important. 4 - Electricity bills... now this is important when you have 1000 computers. ---------------------------------------- But I it will be interesting to see the new SSDs arrive: FusionIO's PCIe super fast drives, IBM's 4TBs drives, ... SDDs already can take HHDs on: Speed, power, space, cooling, shock resistance, ... And by next year all of the above will continue to be improved upon, and these will be additional SSDs advantages: Price, capacity, ... There is no turning back.

Q report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +2