Seagate, currently the worlds largest manufacturer of traditional hard drives, has decided to enter into an emerging market. The still new but very interesting solid-state disks, which we have been watching, will have Seagate backing them. They are aiming their units at the enterprise first.
Interestingly, the CEO of Seagate had some rather harsh words to say about existing SDD manufacturers, claiming their supporting technology is outdated:
Besides, the storage component--flash chips or magnetic platters--are only one component of a drive, said Watkins. There are also chips, boards and lots of software. ... "This has a million lines of code in it," Watkins said, holding up a hard drive. "The million lines of code make it a solution." ... The flash-based notebooks on the market today, he said, are "ten years behind."
He went on to say that he thinks flash will only ever reach about 7% of the market, at least with the storage demands as they are today. Even still, 7% would be quite a bit for such a new item. The downsides to SDD haven't stopped many others from pursuing it and obviously Seagate doesn't want to be left behind.
PQI, for instance, claims they will soon have a 256GB SDD unit for sale, and many companies such as Dell, HP and Acer are offering notebooks with SDD options. With Seagate now competing with others like Samsung, perhaps development will be pushed even faster. I for one look forward to this.
It was just a mere two years ago when the concept of SDD was just barely emerging. Now we're actually seeing it in use. That's a quick pickup.