Seagate talks SSDs

[safan80]

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/10/10/seagate-talks-ssds


By Sylvie Barak: Friday, 10 October 2008, 6:30 PM

NOT ONLY WILL Seagate make the move to Solid State Drives (SSDs) in 2009, it may also make them its core business, replacing rotational hard disks as the company’s bestsellers.

Speaking to CNET, Seagate’s senior manager of market development, Rich Vignes, noted that the first step was to persuade people of the reliability of solid state drives by establishing an industry standard for endurance and life expectancy.

Once that mission is accomplished, Vignes is optimistic about SSD’s success, and the analysts seem to be on his side.

The company reckons it has enough experience to enter the SSD market due to its many years spent noodling about with error correction.

Seagate will initially test the waters by flogging SSDs to the big fish, enterprise customers, before beginning to flood the consumer market.

But there are plenty more fish in the SSD sea, including Intel which has already started shipping SSDs aimed at both consumers and enterprise. Samsung is another big player in the consumer space, already selling its SSDs to Apple and Dell and having announced its SSDs have also been chosen by HP for its ProLiant blade servers.

But Vignes isn’t put off by the competition. "While for some companies, it's a new market and a new product, for us, it's an existing market, new product," he noted. µ

L'Inq
CNET

[Soulburner]

Great, more competition, better products at lower prices.

[zanzabar]

samsung also makes alot of the drives, like ocz, patriot, super talent and others


is seagate going to make the drives or relabel them

[cegras]

samsung also makes alot of the drives, like ocz, patriot, super talent and others


is seagate going to make the drives or relabel them

I thought seagate purchased a flash firm a while ago .. or did the deal fall through?

[RejZoR]

samsung also makes alot of the drives, like ocz, patriot, super talent and others


is seagate going to make the drives or relabel them

Well, they can still buy flash chips and controllers from other companies (like most of them do anyway) and assemble them in their factories.
Building SSD's is actually easier than building rotating HDD's.
All you have to do is to stick all components to a circuit board (when you have it done right). Then you just replace those chips with faster ones, those who last longer and with better controllers. In the end, visual design of the SSD outer casing seems to be the most demanding task hehe. Making it look pretty and all :P

[Swatrecon_]

This is great and all, but people are going to miss large drives aren't they?

[Helmore]

This is great and all, but people are going to miss large drives aren't they?

Mis lager drives? I don't know what you mean by that....
Seagate and such have no plans to abandon the traditional HDD, they just intent to enter the SSD market as well that's all. We will see 5 TB HDD in the future, no worries there.

[Stevethegreat]

This is great and all, but people are going to miss large drives aren't they?

SSDs for OS and software, rotating disks for data. It seems the two would go together in the following years.

[Kingcarcas]

Sweet! I think my next upgrade will be a SSD instead of a CPU/Mobo overhaul. :up:

[Leeghoofd]

Same here, once the prices go down a tad I will buy a 64gb SSD... more competition is better for the end user...

[Helmore]

Same here, once the prices go down a tad I will buy a 64gb SSD... more competition is better for the end user...

It's that you don't really need more than 64GB though, as a 'Leeghoofd' (='emptyhead' when literally translated) I mean. :p: :D :yepp: *just kidding*

[Leeghoofd]

I only will use the SSD for OS purposes and some benching, games and co will remain on good old platters...

[inCore]

64 GB is such an irritating size. It's a lot bigger than an OS and too small for a collection of anything. Once you start installing games on it, you'll run out of space and good luck moving your installations to another drive.

[Leeghoofd]

32GB seems to be not enough for Vista and some apps after a while... next up is 64Gb... my first partition is 40GB and it's really stuffed... with XP I always had plenty of free space on the C drive... Norton Ghost is my best friend :)...

[BababooeyHTJ]

You can pick up a 64gb ocz ssd at newegg now, after mail in rebate. I dont know how I didnt buy it.

[Helmore]

You can pick up a 64gb ocz ssd at newegg now, after mail in rebate. I dont know how I didnt buy it.

Those SSDs seem to be pretty crappy according to most reviews and users, AnandTech even claims that it's because of the controller not being up to snuff. Just wait for some more advanced SSDs like the ones from Intel and future SSDs from Samsung and MTRON.

[Hornet331]

The intel ssd and the SLC samsungs are the only ssds worth buying, everything elses is crap, period. ;)

[hecktic]

The intel ssd and the SLC samsungs are the only ssds worth buying, everything elses is crap, period. ;)

got any model numbers in mind :)

[Hornet331]

got any model numbers in mind :)

All intel ssds (there are only 3. ;) X18-M X25-M X25-E) and the newer Samsung ssds like the MCCOE64G5MPP.

But just check some reviews of the X25 and you'll see. ;)

[Rob94hawk]

HDD's are going the way of AGP. But only if they have insane read/write speeds. I wan't minimum 200MB read speads so my son doesn't have to wait 10 minutes to load 5GB of trains off his raptor.

[[XC] Lead Head]

HDD's are going the way of AGP. But only if they have insane read/write speeds. I wan't minimum 200MB read speads so my son doesn't have to wait 10 minutes to load 5GB of trains off his raptor.

Most harrddrives can at least average 80MB/s. It shouldn't take more the a minute or two to load 5 GB of data.

[Zytek_Fan]

samsung also makes alot of the drives, like ocz, patriot, super talent and others


is seagate going to make the drives or relabel them

I believe I saw somewhere that they will be relabeling drives from another firm, most likely Super Talent or Micron.

edit: Given that Intel and Micron have a joint venture for SSDs, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the relabeled market is Micron.

[BossBorot]

heres to hoping for conventional HDDs with SSD slapped onto them

[Zytek_Fan]

heres to hoping for conventional HDDs with SSD slapped onto them

You mean hybrids? They were discussed in this month's issue of CPU Magazine, and right now, hybrid drives are pretty much awful :down:

I'll scan it up sometime tomorrow if anyone wants to see...

[hecktic]

anyone working for Seagate who uses XS ??

(i ask cause i want to see some pictures of any developments in SSD)

[dinos22]

next year will be just fantastic