NOT ONLY WILL Seagate make the move to Solid State Drives (SSDs) in 2009, it may also make them its core business, replacing rotational hard disks as the company’s bestsellers.

Speaking to CNET, Seagate’s senior manager of market development, Rich Vignes, noted that the first step was to persuade people of the reliability of solid state drives by establishing an industry standard for endurance and life expectancy.

Once that mission is accomplished, Vignes is optimistic about SSD’s success, and the analysts seem to be on his side.

The company reckons it has enough experience to enter the SSD market due to its many years spent noodling about with error correction.

Seagate will initially test the waters by flogging SSDs to the big fish, enterprise customers, before beginning to flood the consumer market.

But there are plenty more fish in the SSD sea, including Intel which has already started shipping SSDs aimed at both consumers and enterprise. Samsung is another big player in the consumer space, already selling its SSDs to Apple and Dell and having announced its SSDs have also been chosen by HP for its ProLiant blade servers.

But Vignes isn’t put off by the competition. "While for some companies, it's a new market and a new product, for us, it's an existing market, new product," he noted. µ

L'Inq
CNET