Seagate Busts Into the SSD Market

Seagate Busts Into The SSD Market

By John Vinson
Expert Author
Article Date: 2009-12-14

Seagate, one of the older hard drive manufacturers in existence, has been reluctant to create SSD's (solid state drives). They've commented on their reluctance in the past, stating SSD's have a very small market and haven't quite lived up to their potential yet. They've released their first SSD into the market, though you'll only have use for it if you use a server computer.

The new SSD is named Pulsar, and delivers up to 200 GB of storage capacity. The blade is designed for general server applications and has a 2.5 inch form factor. One of the knocks of SSD has been that the format is able to hold less amount of storage, while being more expensive to make. This has led Seagate to hold back manufacturing on a general consumer level. Their Pulsar release is their way of testing the waters.

Although SSD has negatives in the world of PCs and notebooks, the technology has made waves in the mobile community. Now, with the new found speed of the Flash based SSD's, server computer hard drives are looking going down this avenue.

Dave Mosley, Seagate executive vice president, Sales, Marketing, and Product Line Management had this to say in the Pulsar press release, "Seagate is optimistic about the enterprise SSD opportunity and views the product category as enabling expansion of the overall storage market for both SSDs and HDDs" he continues, ""Our strategy is to provide our customers with the exact storage device they need for any application, regardless of the component technology used. We are delivering on that strategy with the Pulsar™ drive, and you can expect additional products in the future from Seagate using a variety of solid state and rotating media components"

This news is dire for the smaller companies who've been manufacturing SSD's with Seagate watching from the sidelines. There have been some larger companies who manufacture flash based hard drives as well (Samsung, Toshiba) who probably took the news the same as the smaller fish. With the likes of Google, Microsoft buying almost exclusively from Seagate it's likely the company will power its way into the SSD market with one product release.

There's a large contingency in the hard drive community who believe Flash based memory is the wave of the future. While it hasn't quite caught up to the juggernaut storage spaces of traditional hard drives, it's speed and ability for fitting in smaller form factors makes it a format to watch in the future. If Seagate gets in on the fun, the future might show up sooner than expected.

About the Author:
John is a staff writer for WebProNews.