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Seagate Technology

Seagate is the worldwide leader in the design, manufacture and marketing of hard disk drives, providing products for a wide-range of applications, including Enterprise, Desktop, Mobile Computing, Consumer Electronics and Branded Solutions. Seagate's business model leverages technology leadership and world-class manufacturing to deliver industry-leading innovation and quality to its global customers, with the goal of being the low cost producer in all markets in which it participates. The company is committed to providing award-winning products, customer support and reliability to meet the world's growing demand for information storage. Seagate can be found around the globe and at www.seagate.com.

• editor's comments:- January 2010 Seagate hasn't been involved in the SSD market long enough yet to earn any positive mentions in the 30 Years of SSD Market History.
  
  Here are some recent Seagate SSD milestones.
  
  In December 2009 - Seagate entered the SSD market and announced details of its Pulsar SSD - a 2.5" SATA SLC SSD with 200GB capacity.
  
  Sequential R/W rate is upto 240MB/s and 220MB/s respectively, R/W IOPS are 30,000 and 25,000 respectively. Aimed at the server market the BER is quoted as 1 sector per 10E16. Seagate says it has been sampling the new drive - its 1st SSD - since September 2009.
  
  Editor's comments:- the remarkable thing about Seagate's 1st SSD is that it took the company so many years to enter the market. Technically - it's unremarkable.
  
  Will it succeed in the market? In my view it would be unrealistic to assume that Seagate's long running dominance in the hard disk market will translate to dominance in SSDs too - because nearly all its potential oem customers have already been evaluating or using SSDs from other sources for upto 4 years.
  
  And even if Seagate's new product succeeds in filling holes in design slots in 2010 - its oem customers can always replace this product with their own designs leveraging the merchant market for SSD controllers & IP.
  
  To succeed in the SSD market - Seagate will have to demonstrateunique mastery in some aspect of SSD technology which customers value. The most attractive area will probably be in the area of reliability.
  
  In recent quarters we've seen a spate of flaky SSDs get to market. This tendency will rise in 2010 as many storage oems - racing to join the SSD market bubble - decide that shipping untried products is a lower risk to their businesses than losing out on customer mind share. Each bad news story helps companies who have a clean reputation. But as a newcomer to the SSD market Seagate may have to wait years to establish its own reputation.
  
  It's tempting to compare Seagate's entry to the SSD market with Western Digital. But the 2 cases are completely different. When WD acquired SiliconSystems in March 2009 - it got a business which had started marketing SSDs in August 2004. That gives WD's product marketers 5 years of market experience they can talk to customers about - compared to 3 months for Seagate. Nevertheless - being late is better than never.
  
  In January 2010 - LSI and Seagate announced they have collaborated on designing PCIe SSDs for the enterprise accelerator market which will sample in Q2 2010.