Seagate is currently one of the largest makers of traditional hard drives, and while it plans to stick to the market that has largely been its bread and butter, the company recently confirmed it is set to introduce its first solid-state drive in 2009 as it continues to fight others over alleged patent infringement in their SSDs.
The company has been known for downplaying the importance of SSDs in today's consumer market, claiming users are reluctant to give up cheap cost-per-gigabyte storage. Consequently, its first SSD product will cater to enterprise-class users only, who Seagate argues are most likely to need very high-speed disks regardless of the price.
Though the company does foresee a time when solid state disks are a better value, Seagate won't focus on consumer SSDs until the price falls to the 10-cents-per-GB level. In the meantime, traditional rotating hard disks will remain their focus, with a 2TB drive also ready to hit shelves next year. Unfortunately, details such as a release date and price for these drives were not available.