Seagate Offers A Solid-State Drive (Finally)

from the everyone's-doing-it-now dept

For the past few years, Seagate has been noticeably absent when it came to solid state drives, even being somewhat belligerent towards the technology. In the meantime, though, the enterprise market has been served by several solid state storage manufacturers: Intel, Micron Technology, Samsung, and STEC. So more than a year after it announced a move to SSDs, Seagate has now officially entered the space with its slow-and-steady strategy of offering a conservative SSD product while at the same time continuing to promote new HDDs.

However, the real news here is that solid state storage is turning the corner -- and bringing Seagate along (not quite kicking and screaming) into the future of more and more competitive storage products. Whereas the market for reliable HDD technology has been dominated by a few manufacturers specialized in making spinning platters with precision, the incipient market for SSDs has a relatively level playing field, given that solid state storage technology is inherently more reliable and not prone to mechanical failures. As the price/performance ratios for SSDs become more competitive with spinning drives, we'll see data centers making storage decisions based on factors other than cost per gigabyte -- such as energy efficiency, cost per IOPs, etc.