14 DAY TRIAL // Seagate Technology, one of the largest manufacturers of magnetic hard drives, is planning to enter the SSD market with a couple of flash-based storage solutions designed for the enterprise market. The company, which has a long story of creating traditional magnetic hard drives, is considering launching its first SSDs no sooner than 2009, according to one of its representatives.
“Our history is based on rotating magnetic media. But as solid-state comes online, we're embracing this new media type,” said Rich Vignes, senior manager of market development at the Scotts Valley, California-based company.
The news comes to confirm an ongoing trend in the market, which sees almost every major storage vendor launching its own SSD solution, designed either for consumer or for large enterprise customers. Seagate will initially design products for the latter, while the consumer market will be targeted later down the road, when the company will see this as a reliable marketing opportunity. However, there is some catching up to be done, as there are already several established competitors out there.
“There isn't really a clear way of describing endurance or life expectancy of a solid-state drive. So, we're working on that as an industry standard,” Vignes said.
The company will obviously try to make use of its vast experience in error correction, which could just give it a market edge over its other competitors that have just adventured in the industry. “Some of the skills we've picked up along the way, to deal with imperfect media, have applicability to dealing with imperfect media on NAND.”
Vignes confirmed that the main reason for Seagate to enter the SSD market was the speed achieved by SSDs, which surpasses that of traditional hard drives. “SSDs have 100 times better random IOPS than HDDs,” said Gregory Wong, an industry analyst at Forward Insights.
The company will not make NAND, and will use the raw material for its SSDs from premier NAND suppliers, Vignes further explained.