Eying solid-state drives, Seagate tries to quell fears
The largest hard-disk drive maker is going solid-state. Slowly.
Seagate will enter the market for solid-state drives in 2009, as it slowly embraces a technology that will, in some cases, replace its bread and butter: hard disks.
"Our history is based on rotating magnetic media. But as solid-state comes online, we're embracing this new media type," said Rich Vignes, senior manager of market development at the Scotts Valley, Calif.-based company.
Seagate's first target market will be large enterprise customers. Consumer SSDs from Seagate will come later. The challenge is to convince large enterprise customers that SSDs are safe. Although hard-disk drives have endurance problems of their own, corporate customers must be convinced that a technology as new as solid-state storage is reliable.
"There isn't really a clear way of describing endurance or life expectancy of a solid-state drive. So, we're working on that as an industry standard," through JEDEC, a large standard body, Vignes said.
The presence of large players such as Seagate will allay fears, he believes. "As companies like Seagate start to demonstrate field-proven reliability and endurance in enterprise applications, we'll overcome those (solid-state drive) endurance fears."
Analysts are bullish that, with time, SSDs will catch on. "SSDs offer much better MTBFs (mean time between failures) than HDDs, although the endurance is an issue that has to be addressed," said Gregory Wong, an industry analyst at Forward Insights.
"IT managers tend to be conservative, so the qualification time will be quite long--nine months to a year, and early adopters will be Web 2.0 companies such as Google, Facebook," Wong said.
Seagate, which will enter the SSD market in 2009, says there are challenges to make SSDs palatable to large corporate customers.
(Credit: Seagate)Seagate says it can tap into the decades of expertise it has in error correction. "Some of the skills we've picked up along the way, to deal with imperfect media, has applicability to dealing with imperfect media on NAND." All solid-state drives use NAND flash memory as the storage medium.
Fears aside, the lure of SSDs is speed--and this is what is driving Seagate into the market. "For SSDs, the play is performance, performance, performance. Did I mention performance?" Vignes said.
"SSDs have 100 times better random IOPS than HDDs," Wong said, referring to the dramatic speed advantage SSDs have over HDDs in handling input-output operations per second. Samsung has said in the past that companies such as Citibank and American Express peg server performance on IOPS.
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.
"While for some companies, it's a new market and a new product, for us, it's an existing market, new product," Vignes said.
Seagate will get the raw material for SSDs--NAND flash memory--from others. "We're not going to make NAND. We are in discussion with all the premier NAND suppliers," Vignes said.
(Original CNET report here.)
Brooke Crothers has served as an editor at large at CNET News, an editor at Dow Jones' Asian Wall Street Journal Weekly, and a senior editor at InfoWorld. His CNET blog covers chip technology and computer systems, and how they define the computing experience. He also contributes to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. Follow Brooke on Twitter @mbrookec. 
Then, I will have a grand total, including my games (which some take up 4GB's or more!) of about 50GB's on my computer or even less. For me, a 320GB solid state is GREAT! Why? No 'you drop it and it damaged' problems (no moving parts!) and they can last a VERY long time.
Traditional Hard drives seem to be increasing by less than 50% every year. I think it was 15+ months between 1TB and 1.5TB drives being released. Flash media, on the other hand, seems to be doubling every 9 to 12 months. 128 GB drives are out now and 256 GB are just a few months away. By the end of 2010, I'd guess that we will be seeing between 1 and 2 TB solid state drives.
Also, don't forget that Solid state drives seem to be increasing in speed nearly as quickly as they are increasing in capacity.
Unless flash memory stops progressing at its current rate, my guess is that within 3 years you will will have a solid state drive along side your platter based drive(s). Within 6 years, solid state drives will have larger capacities and be several times faster.
Also, memory consumption is an issue. If my hard drive spins down, there's no energy being consumed, but the SSD is always using energy.
Even when a mechanical hard drive is spun down, there is still that leech of energy for the chips on the hard drive..... but basically, that will be for ANY hard drive: SSD, mechanical, whatever until the end of time.
Also power consumption? ddannkaert, have you read anything about SSDs and their power consumption? .1mw is not out of the question, and they will only get better as they are chip based. HDDs in desktops always spin, and thus always use power. SSDs are much more power efficient than HDDs.
Typically with HSM, data gets archived to a tiered archival layers, with the first tier based on hard drives. As data age, they get moved to subsequent archival tiers, some of which might then involve tapes (for very long term storage, usually 6+ years due to compliance requirements.)
Not all data need to be archived in long term storage, so in many cases the majority of the the archives sit in the hard drive based tiers before they get permanently deleted.
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(17 Comments)Would you kindly email me as to which TOS item was violated above? I have posted a URL signature at CNet for quite a while now. I am glad to see that HMTL BRs are no longer needed to get line breaks.