SSDs don’t matter to Seagate but it’s putting all those “HDD crisis” money to good use

Jun 26, 2012 07:51 GMT  ·  By

Seagate was not capable of developing either a decent SSD or an impressive hybrid drive in the past years. The company did everything to play down the role SSDs have on the computer storage market. Now, Seagate is using some of the money they“extorted” from the HDD buyers to invest in SSD technology.

The “HDD crisis” seems to have provided Seagate and Western Digital with money to solve every single problem they had.

Both companies claimed that SSDs have no impact and no particularly bright future in the storage market, but both of them were investing seriously in the SSD field.

Western Digital acquired Siliconsystems and released a range of mediocre products.

Seagate tried to cut costs on the Hybrid HDD concept and, despite the fact that the market agrees that the HDD-to-flash ratio in a Hybrid HDD should be 20:1, Seagate has manufactured and marketed Hybrid drives with a 125:1 ratio that resulted in mediocre performance.

The company also had “burning” issues with their so-called professional HDD line, the Pulsar 2, and the review samples were quickly recalled after it was discovered that the controller was reaching temperatures of 80 degrees Celsius.

Now, Seagate uses some of those incredibly high profits they made during the “HDD crisis” they orchestrated along with Western Digital to invest in an Israeli company called DensBits.

DensBits has patented Memory ModemTM controller technology that has consumer and enterprise applications using 3 bits per cell or TLC and 2 bits per cell MLC.

The technology is planned to be used with 1x nm Flash manufacturing, as it is known that as the manufacturing advances, the durability of the devices decreases.

DensBits’ tech is supposed to help in that regard.