Seagate to Offer SSDs in 2008

By Greg McNevin

August 24, 2007: Seagate is reportedly preparing to launch itself headlong into the solid state disk (SSD) storage market next year, extending the company’s notebook offerings to include traditional magnetic hard disks, hybrids and full flash drives.

Seagate already offers hybrid flash memory and magnetic storage drives in its Momentus notebook line. Aimed at notebooks these drives offer some of the benefits of SSDs (faster boot up times, less power usage and faster read times) while maintaining large capacities.

The move to offer full flash SSDs marks a new direction for the company, and further cements the growing importance of SSD technology in the mobile market.

“We have solid-state drives on every road map that we have,” Seagate CEO Bill Watkins told The Wall Street Journal in a recent interview.

Indeed for many mobile workers notebooks running SSDs cannot come into widespread use soon enough. After all, not everyone needs hundred of gigs of storage, but a laptop that boots faster, runs longer between charges and is lighter and more robust is hard to turn down.

Due to this, the popularity of SSDs is growing rapidly with a number of manufacturers including Toshiba, Samsung and SanDisk rolling out drives this year, and companies such as Sony and Dell offering SSD powered notebooks.

Seagate believes it can do better though. Watkins told the WSJ that the current batch of SSD notebooks are ten years behind what they should be, adding that “We are going to have a solid state drive, probably for enterprise first. We think we can make these drives better.”

The biggest dampener on the SSD front so far has been the price of Flash memory, however, as consumer demand for flash grows exponentially costs are falling rapidly and gaining on traditional magnetic storage.

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