Seagate, the world’s leading hard disk drive (HDD) maker, has finally introduced its first solid-state drive (SSD) in the shape of the 2.5-inch Pulsar unit.
Seagate is late to the game on SSDs – a potential threat to its traditional business – and its first product will be aimed at the enterprise rather than consumer market.
Pulsar is designed for blade and general server machines, giving faster access to frequently called-up data through its use of banks of flash memory chips rather than a spinning disk. Its SSDs will have a capacity of up to 200Gb initially.
SSDs are more expensive than HDDs and wear out sooner – there is a limit to the amount of times data can be reliably written to the chips.
Seagate is therefore targetting the enterprise, where performance is more important than cost, and its use of single-level cell (SLC) technology, rather than multi-level, provides greater endurance and reliability.
SSDs are beginning to make an impact at opposite ends of the PC spectrum – in enterprise servers and consumer netbooks – but Seagate sees higher margins for its expertise in the enterprise, with flash memory already a fairly commoditised business.
“Nand flash is a commodity consumer product, what Seagate birings to the enterprise is its experience in serving the major storage companies – it’s had about a 60 per cent market share in enterprise hard drives for several years running now,” Joe Unsworth, flash memory analyst at the Gartner research firm, told me.
“Are they late to the game? Yes. But have they missed the boat? No. It’s still a very small market – this year we’re expecting about 281,000 units [to ship] but the market we believe will grow to 5.3m units in 2013.”
Mr Unsworth says SSDs will eat into Seagate’s high-end hard drive business, but their ability to access databases faster will lead to larger databases overall that need more archival information stored on cheaper disk drives, thereby growing the market for the traditional media.
Dave Mosley, executive vice president for sales and marketing at Seagate, says anyone predicting the death of the disk drive at the hands of SSDs is well wide of the mark:
“Seagate views the product category as enabling expansion of the overall storage market for both SSDs and HDDs,” he says.
“HDDS and SSDs will co-exist for a long time.”
