Seagate makes plans for an SSD future

In a move which we all hope will be a sign of things to come, Seagate -- prominent mechanical drive-maker -- has voiced its intentions to enter the SSD game in the near future. According to Bill Watkins, the company's chief executive, the drive manufacturer will be getting into the solid-state market sometime next year, beginning with some form of enterprise solution. "We have solid-state drives on every road map that we have," Watkins said, though Seagate sold off the 40 percent stake it held in SanDisk, a chipmaker which now has almost the same market value as the drive company. Watkins was tight-lipped about exactly what kind of products the company will offer, though he did hint at a "hybrid" which uses both chips and disks to store data. It was only a matter of time till the drive makers started feeling heat from the SSD and flash markets -- hopefully this will help bring prices down to reasonable levels.

[AlexP @ Aug 23rd 2007 9:37AM]

They don't really have a choice, hard drives are a dated technology that need to go away and SSDs clearly appear to be the future, if Seagate doesn't jump on the ship they'll suffer on the long run... And horribly.

[mattweiler @ Aug 23rd 2007 9:57AM]

LOL
"hopefully this will help bring prices down to reasonable levels."

Are you guys kidding?
This will only increase the cost of storage.
Flash storage, while has been getting cheaper like all technology, is still way more expensive than magnetic platters.
(you can get a 500GB SATA2 7200RPM drive for ~$120,
while a 16GB Solid State drive will cost you ~$100)
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2982

[Andir3.0 @ Aug 23rd 2007 10:04AM]

um... That's what they are talking about. SSD Prices are way expensive. With more people in the pot, they are likely to try to find a way to make things more comfortable (IE, small, cheaper, etc.) Your thinking of it from a byte/dollar ratio right now. They are talking about research to bring the prices down on SSD so your little comparison of price/byte is less drastic or null.

[mattweiler @ Aug 23rd 2007 10:19AM]

Sorry, I didn't say that right.
I just mean that it will take a while for the prices to drop to a competitive level.
I am happy to see that seagate (great HDD maker) is adapting to the new world, but for the majority of us consumers, we won't see any benefits for quite some time.
On the plus side, regular storage may drop even more, but even those will have their base levels.

Go SSD

[ADPatel @ Aug 23rd 2007 10:20AM]

Yeah uh, economics.. more research and more competition will bring prices down

what's not to get?

how can this possibly be bad?

[Homeboy @ Aug 23rd 2007 10:34AM]

Today the biggest use of an SSD drive is to install the OS and software on, Quicker loading and reading times. For storing Peter North and Cumfiesta movies a good old 250GB HDD does the job better.

I have two drives in my laptop. On contains the OS and the other one is strictly music and movies. I could consider moving the OS to a 32GB or 64GB SSD drive.

[ADPatel @ Aug 23rd 2007 10:21AM]

Oh. You replied before I did. Okay. Point.

[mattweiler @ Aug 23rd 2007 10:22AM]

no worries

[Justin @ Aug 23rd 2007 10:47AM]

Maybe I'm just backward here, but isn't anyone concerned anymore about the write limitations inherent in SSD storage? Not to mention the cost and the capacity...

For now, no thank you.

[fred @ Aug 23rd 2007 11:09AM]

The life of your current harddisk is limited as well. Why is that not a problem?

[dj-kenpo @ Aug 23rd 2007 12:47PM]

SSD's aren't under the same limitations as flash, it's higher grade stuff, a normal mechanical drive will fail long before an ssd would.

t's also not ahrd to imagine that in about 5 years time you'll be able to get raided ssd's as they're very thin and small compared to a typical mechnaical drive, so all in all, these are great and far safer. there's nothing here to fight or complain about, they're better, lower power consumers and quickly dropping in price

[Oddity @ Aug 24th 2007 5:08AM]

Justin, when a cell on a flash drive fails, it always fails on write (SSDs, unlike hard drives, are not worn down by read operations), and it's just one cell out of billions. The failure is immediately detected, and the write operation can be retried to another cell. If large numbers of cells start failing, the drive can warn its user early, long before the drive becomes unusable. And even when the SSD can take no more write operations, all the data stored on it up to that point will still be perfectly readable.

When a hard drive fails, it typically fails on read (at which point the data has already been lost), and since hds are mechanical devices, failure often results in the entire drive becoming unreadable. Hd failures are also quite unpredictable (recent studies have shown that SMART data is next to useless). If you have always seen clear signs that a hd is failing, you've been very lucky.

In short, SSDs almost always fail in a predictable and controllable manner, minimizing data loss. Hard drives do not.

[Justin @ Aug 23rd 2007 11:13AM]

I didn't mean to imply that it wasn't. The advantage, though, is that there are typically clear signs when a hard drive is beginning to fail, leaving ample time to ghost the drive to a new one.

When a cell on a flash drive fails due to overuse, it's just gone. If you've got a journaling OS like most of us, and you put it on a flash drive, you're asking--no, begging--for disaster.

[Froggy @ Aug 23rd 2007 1:07PM]

Maybe that means that they will start really getting into hybrid drives. That would be a good initial compromise between speed, cost, and capacity.