Seagate Announces First SSD, 2TB HDD

Lucas123 writes "Seagate CEO Bill Watkins said today that the company plans to put out its first solid state disk drive next year as well as a 2TB version of its Barracuda hard disk drive. Watkins also alluded to Seagate's inevitable move from spinning disk to solid state drives, but emphasized it will be years away, saying the storage market is driven by cost-per-gigabyte and though SSDs provide benefits such as power savings, they won't be in laptops in the next few years. A 128GB SSD costs $460, or $3.58 per gigabyte, compared to $60 for a 160GB hard drive, according to Krishna Chander, an analyst at iSuppli. 'It will take three to four years for SSDs to come to parity with hard drives,' on price and reliability."

Comments

Price / Performance isn't always king

[wolf12886]

Technically speaking, if it were always about price vs performance, we'd all be running last generation AMD's, using CD-R's and the like. In reality, you don't pay proportionally more for extra performance, you pay EXPONENTIALLY more.

For the average consumer, SSD's aren't yet the way to go, but for what I'd bet is a good proportion of the /. readership, a 20% boost in performance is worth a 200% increase in price, especially considering how cheap computing equipment is these days, compared to the utility it offers.

Re:Price / Performance isn't always king

[Enderandrew]

Last year when I built my budget rig, I bought a dual core X2 3600+ for 35$ and the cheapest comparable offering Intel has was $150, and benchmarks showed basically the same performance between the two.

Intel has better performance at the top-end right now, but that doesn't mean they win performance-per-dollar.

Re:Me Too!

[code4fun]

Or, it could be they lost business deals from customers like Google who are switching to faster SDD drives. It would also explain the recent grumbles they had about suing flash companies on trying to get in their enterprise business.

Re:Analysts are dumb

[rrohbeck]

Actually there are reasons why SSDs may catch up to rotating disks:

1. Rotating disks get closer to physical limits and designers are planning for some big technology changes that will have an effect on cost. Check out Mark Kryder's video presentation on future disk technologies at CMU (I don't have the URL handy.)

2. SSD technology can go up with Moore's law for the foreseeable future.

3. We're getting to the point where SSDs reach practical sizes. I don't need 1TB in my laptop - I could live with 64GB quite well (I only have 120GB right now.) So, in a year or two I can probably get an SSD for my typical usage pattern at a decent price. At that point the volume for SSDs will grow dramatically and rotating disks will be used mostly for very large capacity and/or very low $/GB. Less profitable => fewer engineering dollars => slower density growth. Just what happened to tape a decade ago.

Re:Me Too!

[Firethorn]

The only reason they are trying to break into this market (that they continuously decry as useless, futile, and too expensive) is because they are afraid of what "might" happen ten years down the road.

I'd say they're being smart. Right now Seagate DOES have market recognition for storage. A proper, forward thinking CEO(I know, rare), should always be thinking on how to adapt to evolving markets.

Much like how, when IBM started, they were a tabulating machine company. If they had tried to stay that, they wouldn't be around today.

Much like how, if you start digging into them, you'll find many oil companies are busily attempting to become 'energy' companies, diversifying into solar, wind, biological fuel production, etc...

Sure, right now SSD doesn't make financial sense in most applications. But it's out there, it's selling. It doesn't take much work to look at a graph comparing SSD vs HD cost per gig for various form factor hard drives. It doesn't take much to look at computer usage and realize that the majority of laptop users aren't filling up their existing hard drives. It doesn't take much to look at the dropping cost of a usefully large SSD vs the more or less constant 'minimum cost' low capacity HD. Just looking at these factors a competent CEO will realize that Seagate could be relegated to special purpose needs, and maybe even bankrupt from the loss of the mass market.