Seagate has taken competition in the nascent solid-state drive market to a new level by becoming the first of the tier-one hard drive vendors to introduce an SSD.
Seagate on Tuesday unveiled the Seagate Pulsar drive, beating competitors Western Digital and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies to the punch and planting its flag in a market that is currently dominated by smaller hard drive vendors or companies that in the past did not produce hard drives.
There are two types of SSDs, depending on the Flash memory technology on which it is built. SSDs like the Seagate Pulsar feature single-level cell (SLC) memory technology, in which one bit of data occupies one cell of the flash memory, making it optimized for performance and data reliability. Other SSDs feature multilevel cell (MLC) technology, in which four bits of data occupy one cell of the Flash memory for greater capacity.
The Seagate Pulsar comes in a 2.5-inch form factor with a SATA interface, and offers capacity of up to 200 GB. The company said that it is currently available to storage system vendors on an OEM basis for qualification purposes, and that there are currently no details about any plans to bring the SSDs to indirect sales channels.
Seagate recently reported that it expects SSD sales to be material to Seagate's overall revenue sometime between 2011 and 2013.
The SSD market has been dominated by smaller hard drive companies such as Samsung and Fujitsu, or by companies which never manufactured hard drives, including such companies as Intel, Fusion I/O, Violin, Texas Memory Systems, SanDisk, PureSilicon, Micron, and STEC.
Until now, the major hard drive players, including Seagate, Western Digital and Hitachi GST, have yet to get into the market as they work to develop technology that suits their enterprise customers' requirements and look to protect their legacy business, but things are changing.
Western Digital in March acquired SiliconSystems, which develops SSDs for embedded systems. Hitachi GST is developing SSDs with Intel, and plans to introduce them in the first half of 2010.
Meanwhile, storage, server, and PC vendors such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM, NetApp, Dell and Compellent all adopted SSDs for part of their product lines, joining companies like EMC and Sun Microsystems which did the same last year.
|
New Storage Devices Come To Light At CES 2012, Storage Visions While the buzz in Las Vegas this week was focused on tablets, TVs, and smart mobile devices, there was plenty to see at the CES and Storage Visions conferences for anyone looking for the latest storage innovations. |
|
12 New Flash Memory, SSD Devices Provide Diversity Diversity was the watchword in the second half of 2011 as vendors introduced a wide range of SSDs and Flash memory devices to increase the storage performance of mission-critical applications. |
|
10 Storage Predictions For 2012 The storage industry will never be the same after 2012 as data capacity growth decelerates, cloud storage accelerates, and mobile devices force storage admins to rework their playbooks. |
 More
Slide Shows |
- SSDs Not Quite Ready For Prime Time
- Join The Crowd: Micron Targets Mobile PCs With New SSD
- HP Intros SSDs To ProLiant Server Line
- STEC Unveils SSDs With Enhanced Reliability, Lower Cost
- Vendors Target Enterprise, Mobile Apps With SSDs
- Red Hat Releases Virtual Storage Appliance For Amazon AWS
- VARs Say VCE To Target SMBs With Entry-Level Vblocks
- EMC Still Tops In Storage Software, But IBM Closes On Symantec For Second Spot: IDC
- Market-Topping Revenue Growth Lets EMC Extend Storage Lead: IDC
- Hard-Drive Shortage Hits Enterprise Drive Shipments Hard
- Unscathed By Thailand Floods, Seagate Raises Q3 Revenue Guidance 60 Percent
- Western Digital Restarts Thailand Hard Drive Production Earlier Than Expected
- Western Digital Enters Small Business Storage Appliance Market
