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Seagate is a world leader in hard disk drives and storage solutions.
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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. | |
see also:-
Seagate
- editor mentions on StorageSearch.com and
Seagate's
SSD page
who's who in SSD? - by Zsolt Kerekes, editor - February 2013
Seagate
is a Top 20 SSD Company.
Seagate's position in the development of the SSD market upto now has
been that of a follower of, investor in, and integrator of 3rd party SSD
IP rather than an originator of leading SSD technologies. Seagate's highest
rank to date in the top SSD companies list was #11 in
Q1 2011.
Seagate was a
comparatively late entrant to the SSD market launching its first SSDs in
December 2009. But Seagate was already corporately aware of SSDs - having launched an
unsuccessful lawsuit aimed at
STEC the year before.
Why
didn't Seagate's dominance in the hard drive market translate into an early
dominance in SSDs too?
(In case you need reminding - Seagate was
the world's largest HDD maker during the time that companies like
SandForce,
Fusion-io and
Violin were launching
their first products.)
But Seagate's failure to engage constructively
with the SSD market at a critical time in the modern SSD era was noted by
many SSD market commentators.
Among the possible root causes for
what SSD
history will interpret as a missed early opportunity for Seagate to make
its own mark in steering the direction of the SSD market are these factors.
- Seagate misunderstood the
potential size of
the SSD market opportunity - and didn't think it was important enough
compared to other business opportunities in hard drives.
In early 2011
- in keeping with the tone of a multi-year series of "SSD-denier"
style corporate marketing communications which started hitting newswires and
blogs (and mysteriously disappearing again) in the apologetic years before
before Seagate had any SSDs of its own to talk about ("but you wait and
see - when Seagate does SSD - we will be the best") - Seagate in
January 2011 - finally offered to the world a hard hitting rebuttal to the
SSD-taking-over-the-world view in an
economics
focused paper which argued that the reason hard drives would remain
the dominant storage technology was because - the company reassured us - it
would cost far too much for the SSD market to invest enough resources into
replacing hard drives.
StorageSearch.com was not alone in thinking -
but maybe was alone in asserting so aggressively - that Seagate's
analysis and vision was
NUTS!.
We
said - if users see unbeatable business advantages from SSDs (something we
had already
analyzed and demonstrated longe before) - then the necessary investments
would be made to support the larger SSD ecosystem.
- when Seagate did begin to realize that the SSD market wasn't going to go
away - the SSD market had already grown too complicated for Seagate to
understand what was going on and Seagate was in no position to entertain the
idea of becoming a credible technology leader.
It's likely that a
root cause of Seagate's wrong footedness in SSDs in the 2003 to 2011 years
was due to the company's management mistakenly
viewing
SSDs as just an expensive specialized form of hard drive.
Seen
from that perspective
hybrid drives
and co-existance look like a better solution than they do from a pure SSD
perspective.
As Seagate didn't develop an adequate SSD IP set of its
own - the company's first SSD products relied heavily on 3rd party IP from
LSI and
SandForce. However
after LSI's acquisition of SandForce in January 2012 it soon became clear that
LSI was perfectly capable of getting storage oem customers such as EMC and
Intel on its own. It didn't need Seagate as a route into the SSD market.
More
recently - 2012 and 2013 - Seagate has therefore been pursuing the only
realistic options left to latecomers in the SSD market -
acquisition,
licensing 3rd party IP and badge engineering.
Examples of this
activity include:-
- - licensing IP from the adaptive R/W flash company -
DensBits (announced in
June 2012) and
- and oeming the PCIe SSD product line and related enterprise SSD software
from Virident
(announced in January 2013)
I have applauded these recent steps as
positive moves - either of which - if followed through - could improve
Seagate's position within the SSD world.
But SSD is a very competitive
and complex set of markets. Even pure SSD companies - which don't have other
distractions - have a tough enough time understanding what's the right way
to go with products and markets. And I'm still not convinved that Seagate
takes SSDs as seriously as it should.
Looking ahead at the
challenges and opportunities posed by the SSD market for Seagate - I think
that having to share management time and investment resources between the
mutually different interests of solid state and magnetic drive product lines
will lead to tensions and conflicts for resources in which the corporate "compromize
solutions" aren't always going to be the same as the best of class
solutions which the SSD market expects.
What's still lacking at
Seagate (and they aren't the only company in this predicament) is a fiery SSD
core which has the ambition to take on the (SSD) world.
Because in
the modern era of SSDs - the only thing which can beat an SSD in the market - is
another - better SSD. In that context - knowing how to design and build the
best or cheapest hard drives - and having routes to market for hard drives is
- frankly - irrelevant. |
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In March
2008 -
Seagate launched
an SSD patent suit against STEC. This attempt to stall the SSD market by
scaring wannabe oems was unsuccessful.
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 demonstrate unique
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.
In
May 2010 -
Seagate
launched the
Momentus
XT a 2.5" hybrid
drive - for the
notebook PC
market - which internally has a 500GB
HDD cached by a 4GB
SSD ASAP controller.
Seagate said the new drive is OS agnostic and delivers
SSD-like
performance at the lower
price of a hard
drive.
In August 2010 - Samsung and Seagate
announced
they will jointly develop
SSD controller
technologies to operate with Samsung's 30nm-class MLC NAND. The jointly
developed controller will be used in
Seagate's
enterprise-class SSDs.
In January 2011 -
Seagate was ranked #13
in the top 20 SSD
companies list - its highest position since the series began 4 years ago.
In
March 2011 - Seagate
announced details of new
2.5"
SAS SSDs - marketed
under its Pulsar brand
- which will ship in the 2nd quarter.
Available capacities are 400GB
(SLC) and 800GB (MLC). R/W speeds are upto 360MB/s and 300MB/s respectively.
Sustainable random R/W
IOPS are
48K and 22K respectively.
In March 2011 -
Seagate announced
details of new 2.5"
SAS SSDs - marketed
under its Pulsar brand
- which will ship in the 2nd quarter. Available capacities are 400GB (SLC) and
800GB (MLC). R/W speeds are upto 360MB/s and 300MB/s respectively.
Sustainable random R/W
IOPS are
48K and 22K respectively.
In June 2012
- Seagate
announced it will use DensBits's flash
care technology in the
design of forthcoming consumer and enterprise SSDs. Seagate has also made an
equity investment in DensBits.
In January 2013 - Seagate made a strategic
equity investment in Virident as part of a
new collaboration agreement which includes remarketing Virident's
PCIe SSDs and working
together to design new SSDs
for the enterprise market. |
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| don't all PCIe SSDs
look pretty much the same? |
When you look at the
photos and headline specs for high speed PCIe SSDs - it's easy to come away with
the impression that they all look the same and have about the same performance.
After
all - how different can they be?
But don't let the experience of the
2.5" SSD market -
in which clusters of consumer SSD vendors use the
same or similar
controllers and hover
close together inpopular
(consumer) performance rankings - give you the wrong idea about
PCIe SSDs.
In
this market the performance limits and capabilities of the SSD aren't set by an
old hard disk interface
and package limitations.
In the PCIe market the products you get are
limited only by the imagination of the designers - tempered by the guesses of
marketers who are trying to predict the optimum (most salable) features for an
ideal SSD. |
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| Seagate's new SSDs |
Editor:- May 8, 2013 - "Seagate is Serious
about SSD and Flash Technology."
That's the headline of a
new
SSD
products overview page mentioned in a recent
press
release about 3 of the company's newest SSDs.
It's the SAS product which to my way of thinking is the
really new thing here.
Until now if you wanted a
1.8" SSD with a SAS
interface you had to go to
SMART to get
one.
The SAS drives market - which Seagate helped to create - used to be
seen by external commentators as a strategic market for Seagate. (And no
doubt it's still regarded that way by SAS product managers within the company.)
But
Seagate's tardy entry into the enterprise SSD market (December 2009)
which happened only after many of its own enterprise customers had already
responded to the SSD wake up call by
making their own
arrangements - meant that Seagate's continuing existence as a long term
enterprise drive supplier in a world which was
rapidly adopting
SSDs was called into question.
Then when Seagate's first
enterprise SSD dance partners (SandForce and
LSI) eloped to
re-emerge as rival competitors about a year ago - Seagate was left in such a
sorry state that some well meaning stakeholders and seld serving investors were
trying to pair the company off in rumor blogs with
OCZ or
STEC (neither of which
were looking for such a hook up).
Instead - as we learned recently -
Seagate found a very suitable match in the PCIe SSD market with Virident.
And it's safe to assume that if they have any children as a couiple they will
look like 2.5"
PCIe SSDs.
As to Seagate taking the SSD market seriously - which is
where I began this - you could ask - who doesn't?
To misquote Jane
Austen - "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a storage company
in possession of a good fortune must be in want of an SSD product line."
On
the other hand - I would take Seagate's sentiments about SSDs more seriously if
they had been expressed on http://www.seagate.com instead of on the less
imposing address where it currently resides -
http://www.seagate.com/solutions/solid-state-flash-technology/
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| How "solid" is an
SSHD? - when less than 2% of the capacity is solid state |
Editor:- March 5, 2013 - Seagate would like you
to believe that the best way to make a
consumer SSD
better (more affordable) is to put it in a
hard drive.
The
company describes this as "SSD + HDD = the best of both worlds."
Seagate's
latest offerings at the
hybrid drive altar
- Seagate
SSHDs (Solid State Hybrid Drives) - which are designed to deliver
"SSD-like
response from your favorite applications and files" are now shipping
in 2 main wrapper styles:-
- Seagate
Desktop SSHDs - are similar to the notebook drives and have upto 2TB
magnetic capacity in a higher package (26mm rather than 9.5mm).
"Seagate's
engineers have really out done themselves this time" said Scott Horn, Seagate's VP
of marketing in a
press
release today.
"Our new SSHDs serve up your favorite
content with the lightning-fast performance you have to experience to believe.
With these new drives it's like adding a turbo-charge to your PC, without having
to sacrifice capacity, at a price that's easy on your wallet. Now consumers can
create, store and consume digital content like a pro without having to
spend like one."
Editor's comments:- Hybrid drives like this are aimed at the
benchmark experience.
Seagate says they'll boot 5x faster than a
5,400
RPM HDD based notebook. But will that translate into the kind of product
which users will rave about?
Ask yourself this question.... If this
kind of flash to HDD caching ratio (125 to 1) works so well - how come the
enterprise rackmount storage market isn't dominated by racks stuffed full of
Seagate hybrids - using an enterprise-adapted version of Seagate's
Adaptive
Memory Technology?
What are all the clever people in the enterprise
storage market doing wrong? - with their different ways of doing
Auto-tuning SSD
Accelerated Pools of storage?
That's the question I asked myself
about the viability of hybrid drives on these pages back in 2005 - when the
hybrid drive market
began. And I concluded that - if as a user you want better performance - you
will generally get better results and economics by using vanilla HDDs in your
HDD+SSD mix.
That doesn't mean to say that millions of people won't
buy hybrid based PCs. The question is - would they choose to buy the same
product again? And would they recommend it to their friends?
If you
really want park bench performance in the PC experience- rather than
benchmark experience - here's 2 ways to dissect and improve the Seagate
SSHD.
- lose the SATA interface
- lose the hard drive
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| Seagate invests in
Virident's big SSD architecture |
Editor:- January 28, 2013 - Seagate today
announced
it has made a strategic equity investment in Virident as part
of a new collaboration agreement which includes remarketing Virident's
PCIe SSDs and working
together to design new SSDs
for the enterprise market.
"Seagate is thrilled to team with
Virident, a technology leader in one of the fastest growing markets in
enterprise and cloud computing," said Gary Gentry,
senior VP and GM, Solid State Drives at Seagate. "Together, we are working
to develop the next-generation hardware and software solutions in the
PCIe space."
Editor's
comments:- it was obvious a year ago that Seagate's earlier marriage of SSD
IP convenience with LSI
wasn't going to last long or remain monogamous - as LSI and Seagate would be
competing for the same oem design slots in the enterprise market and
furthermore LSI's small architecture
SandForce controller
isn't efficient for
multi-petabyte
scale fast SSD installations. (And in the
consumer market
LSI didn't have the
adaptive
controller IP - which is what led to Seagate's stake in
DensBits)
Virident
- a top 10 SSD company
- has a roadmap
scalable big
architecture enterprise SSD controller and drive family which has been
developed in a cleanroom environment - where all the critical IP has been
devleoped by the company.
The obvious gap in the Seagate / Virident
product line is a 2.5"
removable PCIe SSD (to compete with
Micron) - and it's a no
brainer to see that Seagate's experience with this form factor - coupled with
Virident's SSD design skills could quickly result in viable products for this
new market - which will replace upto
25% of the
projected market for fast
SAS drives. | | |
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| Seagate names new VP SSD |
Editor:- July 30, 2012 - After 6 years at other companies Gary Gentry
has rejoined Seagate
to lead its SSD business as senior VP SSD.
He was recently GM
of the Enterprise SSD Division at
Micron. | | |
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| Seagate
chooses DensBits for TLC and 1Xnm |
Editor:- June 25, 2012 - Seagate announced
today it will use DensBits's
flash care technology in the design of forthcoming consumer and enterprise SSDs.
Seagate
has also made an equity investment in DensBits.
Editor's
comments:- I've already written more than enough about about this technology
trend recently on the home page.
As DensBits told us a few months ago - their business plan is work
with companies which sell complete SSDs - instead of licensing their technology
to other controller
makers. DensBits's technology spans the widest spectrum of adaptive DSP flash
SSD applications from consumer and industrial to fast-enough enterprise SSDs.
If Seagate leverages DensBits's flash technology successfully - the
result will be tougher competition for companies like
SanDisk in the
consumer SSD market
and tougher competition for
STEC and
SMART in the
fast-enough
enterprise SSD market. | | |
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| "In April 2008
- Seagate filed suit against STEC alleging patent infringements
related to hard disk interfaces. The case was seen by many SSD proponents as a
potentially deadly but seriously misguided missile launched at the entire SSD
market. It was later dismissed without merit." |
| ...from:-
SSD market
history | | |
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