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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.
see also:-
Seagate
- editor mentions on STORAGEsearch
- editor's comments:- May 2010 -
Seagate entered the SSD
market later than most other multibillion dollar storage companies.
Samsung had declared
SSDs to be a strategic market in 2005 and
Intel re-entered the SSD
market after a 20 year absence in
2007.
Seagate
has eschewed acquisition and badge engineering as
routes into the SSD
market and seems to be relying on a combination of in-house designs mixed
with licensing some missing IP.
If you're considering SSDs from
Seagate then you should also look at the dozens of competing more experienced
SSD competitors in each of these directories:-
PCIe SSDs,
2.5" SSDs. |
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Seagate SSD milestones from 30 Years of SSD
Market History
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. | |
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| Seagate
launches hybrid for notebooks |
Editor:- May 23, 2010 -
Seagate today
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
says the new drive is OS agnostic and delivers
SSD-like
performance at the lower
price of a hard
drive.
This isn't a new concept - as you can see on this
archived
product page for the Platinum HDD from March 2008. Except that pioneering
old product from DTS was a
3.5" form factor and used a
RAM SSD. (Since then
DTS has moved on to market a
fat flash SSD
- called the Platinum M-Cell
SSD.)
In 2006 the reputation of hybrid hard drives in notebooks
(as a poor man's SSD placeholder) was ruined by the poor performance of
Microsoft's
ReadyDrive support in VISTA. So experienced users may be cautious about
Seagate's new product. Anyone who needs serious PC application performance
won't be wasting their time with a hard drive.
When Seagate introduced
7,200
RPM HDDs in 1992 computer users were impressed by its performance. |
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But Seagate's press
release headline today - "Worlds Fastest Hard Drive for Laptop Computers"
- is a bit of a joke. Because hard drives aren't fast. | | | |
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