Seagate to produce solid state drives

Posted at: 11:05am 24th August 2007 by Ben Hardwidge

Seagate says there could be 500GB flash drives a few years from now, but claims that they will never dominate the storage market

Creator of the original 5.25in hard drive, Seagate, has announced that it intends to join the solid state drive party as early as next year.

Seagate’s corporate communications director for EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa), Ian O’Leary, told Custom PC that the company plans to ‘introduce its own SSD, or solid-state drive, products some time in 2008. This will augment what is already the broadest product line in the storage industry.’

‘Seagate has already introduced hybrid hard drives,’ said O’Leary, ‘which combine flash memory on a hard drive for "best of both" advantages, and we believe a large part of the storage market will adopt this technology moving forward.’

The company’s CEO, Bill Watkins, believes that today’s flash-based laptops are ‘ten years behind,’ and claimed that ‘flash drives will mostly be in the 400GB to 500GB space a few years from now’ in an interview with CNET. However, he also claimed that ‘flash drives will likely never dominate the storage market. There's just too much data out there. But flash drives might account for 7 or so percent of the drive market.’ Watkins said that the company planned to focus on enterprise solid state drives first.

Are the faithful mechanical disk’s days numbered, or will there always be a place for mass magnetic storage? Let us know your thoughts.