Late last year Seagate finally entered the flash storage market with the Pulsar solid-state drive. The hard drive manufacturer has been known for downplaying the importance of SSDs in today's consumer market, and as such it is initially focusing its efforts on the enterprise market only. Today they've taken another step in that direction, announcing a partnership with LSI to sell PCI Express-connected SSDs.

LSI is expected to deliver board-level products that integrate its SAS and PCIe technology with Seagate's solid-state drive technology. Compared to more traditional SATA-based solutions, PCIe has the advantage of being a bit quicker and easier to integrate into the enterprise computing environment.

The devices are expected to compete directly with those from companies such as OCZ, which rencently introduced the all-new Z-Drive p88 featuring replaceable MLC NAND flash modules, and Fusion-IO. Unfortunately, the announcement only revealed the collaboration between the two companies. There was no mention of specific products, expected performance, availability, or what they might cost.