Seagate Gets Serious on SSD Market, Samsung Helps

Seagate may already possess its own solid state drives, but it hasn't really managed to gain any real recognition in this IT field, something that might change now that Samsung's assets are involved.

End-users may be aware of the fact that, not long ago, Samsung and Seagate announced a certain financial agreement.

One term of the deal is that the former's entire HDD division will be bought by the latter, since Samsung wants to focus on other things.

Another term is that Samsung make its NAND Flash technologies available to the HDD giant.

Now, a call with financial analysts revealed that Seagate does plan to get its SSD act more serious, striving for an efficient and fast business development.

Granted, at the moment, it is unclear just how invested the company is in its SSD business and how high it wants to propel it, since SSDs are a very small fraction of its revenues.

It was also made clear that no real results will be visible from this collaboration with Samsung until several yearly quarters have passed.

"Through the mutual supply agreements that are part of our strategic relationship with Samsung, Seagate secures an important source of a leading edge NAND flash supply, as well as early visibility into the development of next-generation NAND technologies,” said Steve Luczo, the head of Seagate, during a recent conference call with financial analysts.

“This will be very valuable to Seagate as we continue to execute on our strategy of developing SSD and solid-state hybrid product offerings. These agreements also position Seagate to be a more significant supplier of disk drives to Samsung for their broad offering of products."

Developing SSDs and investing a steadily growing amount of funds and attention into them may be one way for Seagate to meet the future, now that WD is clearly in the HDD lead after buying Hitachi and seeing how other storage developers are giving up HDDs altogether