Seagate will introduce its first solid-state drive (SSD) storage and 2TB hard drive next year, said company CEO Bill Watkins.

The company's first SSD product will be targeted at enterprises that need speedy storage and can afford to pay a premium for the expensive drives. Seagate has no plans to release SSD drives for consumers, as the high prices could deter them for the next few years, Watkins said in an interview. 

The release date and price information for the 2TB hard drive were not available. Seagate released 1TB hard drives, the Barracuda 7200.11 and Barracuda ES.2, in the middle of 2007. 

While there is no competition now between hard drives and SSDs, Seagate is thinking of going to SSDs in the long term to replace hard drives. 

"SSDs are not price-competitive yet," Watkins said. 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, Watkins said. Low-power consumption capabilities and high speeds make SSDs useful for laptops, but the cost per gigabyte won't come down at least for the next few years, Watkins said. 

"If the cost per gigabyte comes down to 10 cents, maybe," Seagate will focus on SSD storage for consumers, Watkins said. 

A 128GB SSD costs $460, or $3.58 per gigabyte, compared with $60 for a 160GB hard drive, said Krishna Chander, a senior analyst at iSuppli. 

"It will take three to four years for SSDs to come to parity with hard drives" on price and reliability, Chander said. 

Besides price, other issues will keep SSDs from the consumer space, Watkins said. 

Users seek fat storage to carry data, and hard drives can store terabytes of data, something SSDs can't do, Watkins said. SSDs also have write issues, with cells in the drives deteriorating quickly and reducing storage capacity, a general problem that plagues flash drives.

Last edited by Fuad (2008-05-31 03:35:21)