Seagate to jump into the SSD game, 2TB spinners planned for next year

SSDs are the new heat, and while all sorts of upstarts have been cranking them out old-school drive manufacturer Seagate has mostly sat it out and made a lot of noise about patent lawsuits. The lawsuits aren't going away (obviously), but CEO Bill Watkins told PC World yesterday that the company is finally getting ready to release its first SSD sometime next year, as well as launch a line of 2TB traditional hard drives. Watkins said that SSDs weren't yet price-competitive for consumers (uh, yeah), and that Seagate won't focus on consumer SSDs until the price falls to the 10-cents-per-GB level. Until then, the target market is data centers looking to process data quickly or save on energy consumption costs -- the rest of us will just have to save our pennies, apparently.

[Craig @ May 30th 2008 7:56AM]

Chicken & egg, Seagate...if you started making consumer SSDs, the price would come down.

[maty @ May 30th 2008 8:01AM]

I was just about to say. If that was the attitude of all the companies the price would takefar, far longer to come down.

[nikster @ May 30th 2008 10:00AM]

Exactly! And why would Seagate want that? They are doing very well selling HDs and cheap SSDs would just mean lots of new competitors. The last thing they want is for SSD prices to become competitive.

[rav @ May 30th 2008 12:06PM]

They said they wouldn't FOCUS on the consumer market. Not that they wouldn't make any drives at all.

[Tesseract @ May 30th 2008 8:10AM]

I would of though data server companies and the like would want guaranteed reliably and low costs harddrives.

Its consumers who are generally willing to pay a bit more for slight increases in performance that the 100 HD server farms.

[Eoghan @ May 30th 2008 8:16AM]

10c per GB? Are they living in the clouds? I'm from the UK and it's 1GBP per GB over here ($2 per GB). And the price isn't going to go down if you don't make them...hello! Competition!

[Catdaemon @ May 30th 2008 8:28AM]

£1 per GB? Have you been living under a rock? You can get a 1TB drive for £100 and this trend continues downwards.

[Irritant @ May 30th 2008 8:41AM]

@Catdaemon
The price quoted refers to SSD, not traditional drives.

1GBP per GB sounds quite tempting to me, there are some Super Talent 256GB SSDs on the Scan website that clock in at 15.6GBP per GB....

[mattclarkie @ May 30th 2008 8:52AM]

10p for GB sounds about right. But I would be willing to pay nearly 50p per GB on a small boot drive. If you can sell me a 100gb SSD for around £50 I would buy it.

[Wwhat @ May 30th 2008 9:06AM]

I don't buy the story that they are waiting for 10c per GB, that's just a ridiculous goal, that would mean a 500GB SSD would be 50 buck? now get real, to wait that long before getting into SSD is just a joke and would mean the company is already dead due to competition before that time arrived, over there in the year 2040, and if they all wait that long that time will never arrive because you need massproduction to get stuff cheap as others here point out.
I can understand they want to wait for a lower pricepoint though.

[Alimas @ May 30th 2008 9:54AM]

Your paying $320 for 160GB drives?
Your getting ripped off bad, dude.

[tekdroid @ May 30th 2008 8:26AM]

I like Seagate. I like a CEO who makes pr0n references.
I like spinning discs far more than current SSD technology.

[Ignatius @ May 30th 2008 9:04AM]

Some of us actually prefer advancements in technology rather than stagnant, get-off-my-lawn principles.

SSDs are faster, more energy efficient, stronger and quieter.

[tekdroid @ May 31st 2008 6:39PM]

Ignatius,
They aren't always faster, neither is their reliability proven. People automatically think solid-state is the holy grail. It's far from perfect, at least in its current form - and that's without even talking about pricing.

[Warren @ May 30th 2008 8:29AM]

Not true. It depends on type. Google's data centers would use the lowest cost per GB to cache searches. Citibank, however, would pay a premium for best grade hard drives, with extra redundancy as they can't afford to lose any data.

SSD is now used in some datacenters as the boot disk for system; small capacity but fast and in mostly reads-heavy scenarios.

[SoloSalsa @ Jun 9th 2008 6:38PM]

Google uses nearly nothing but RAM.

[Rick @ May 30th 2008 8:31AM]

As great as it is to see bigger capacities in every new generation of hard drives, i get a little concerned with the amount of data at risk in the event of a broken platter.

[L.Rawlins @ May 30th 2008 9:01AM]

I really do hate that Seagate logo...

[Bakari @ May 30th 2008 9:35AM]

I'm a graphic designer, there's nothing wrong with the logo - actually it's pretty dope. It certainly beats the pants off their old one.

[bolezhinkov @ May 30th 2008 12:13PM]

you know it does kind of get the point across - hard drive manufacturer and all

[aardvark sandwich @ May 30th 2008 9:26AM]

I want my 2TB drives NOW!

[pc @ May 30th 2008 9:48AM]

good move

while ssd are supposed to be the shiz nizzlle they've only been around a quick minute so they are really not tested in the real world as far as durability

A 1 tb goes for around $200 a ssd that size isnt even avaialble and if it was would be well over $2000

speed is moot 90% of folks could care less about saving a few seconds

people want cheap 5 year warranty on a 1tb drive under $200 everytime they go on sale I scoop one up and when the 2TB come 2 of them will go in every system I build 4TB PCs with just 2 drives great for media centers : ) or even better 2 External drives for portability I love seagate

[Gibson @ May 30th 2008 10:53AM]

"Seagate won't focus on consumer SSDs until the price falls to the 10-cents-per-GB level"

That HAS to be a mis-quote, he probably said 10-dollars-per-GB. HDDs aren't even at that point today, they're at the about-$3.50-per-GB level.

So basically, Seagate won't get into the consumer SSD game until 2054?

[Gibson @ May 30th 2008 11:00AM]

Or rather, HDDs are still at 35-cents-per-GB, getting moderately cheaper as you go higher every 100GB. Conversely, SSDs are at $17.00.

[Mike @ May 30th 2008 11:45AM]

Mmm, you're paying $0.35/GB? A quick scan of techbargains.com reveals several 750GB drives going for between $105-$110. Some quick arithmatic shows us $0.14 * 750GB=$105. Might want to shop around a little...

[Gibson @ May 30th 2008 11:49AM]

However, Mike, if you look at HDD sizes comparable to the latest SSDs (that is, 128 and now 256GB), you will see that bytes become more expensive in reduced numbers.

[MacroEQ @ May 30th 2008 2:18PM]

About time if you ask me... it will be interesting to see if and when others follow suit...

[macserv @ Jun 1st 2008 3:34AM]

Hehe, "spinners"... nice. Like calling the old chrome Cylons "toasters".

Nothing like a nice subordinating term like that to make an old technology go away. Of course, it COULD rebel...

[dvdivx @ Jun 1st 2008 12:39PM]

Does Seagate even care about the mobile market? Where are the 500gb drives for laptops. Only Fujitsu makes them now and only for the European market.