Seagate to Begin SSD Production in 2009

No matter how much Seagate, Western Digital and all the other large hard drive manufacturers try to tell you otherwise, SSD is not just a fad, and it’s not going away. Though the longevity of Solid-State Disks is still in question, we’re unlikely to find a serious caveat at this point in the game, since SSDs have been around for a while. If there was a serious underlying issue, I’d assume we would have seen it by now.

Seagate, who in the past has shunned the idea of SSD (despite claiming to own patents earlier this year) is planning to launch their own line-up beginning in 2009. The first will be available at the enterprise level, with consumer SSDs to come later. At first, it might seem strange that they are waiting that long, when companies far smaller have been offering them for some time, but the market is still unquestionably small, so they aren’t exactly missing out on a huge opportunity here.

According to the Nanotech blog at CNET, Seagate might manufacturer the technology in their hard drives, but it will be a different story with SSDs, as they’ll purchase memory chips from others, rather than develop it in-house. That makes sense, as their experience in that area, as far as I recall, is minimal. Once their drives are launched though, they’re going to have one heck of a battle. The market is still small, but the competition is fierce, and I’d love to see the guy who will compete with Intel’s masterful controller, as seen in their X-25M.

Of course, it won’t be a cakewalk for Seagate. There is plenty of competition already. Intel has started shipping SSDs for both enterprise and consumer markets. And Samsung is a leading player in the consumer market–its drives are used by Dell and Apple–and it is now stepping up efforts to snag corporate customers. On Thursday, Samsung announced that its SSDs have been selected, after extensive testing, for use in the Hewlett-Packard ProLiant blade servers.