Seagate finally enters SSD business

Seagate has finally entered the solid state drive market after months of waiting for the industry to mature. Today the company announced a 200GB SSD aimed at the enterprise.

Seagate, the largest storage manufacturer in the world, previously told reporters that it would introduce SSD products when it was ready to.

The company has finally introduced the Pulsar SSD, a 2.5-inch, 200GB SSD powered by the SATA interface.  Based on single-layer-cell (SLC) technology, the drive supports 25,000 write input/output operations per second (IOPS) and 30,000 read IOPS.

The Seagate Pulsar is now available to all OEMs interested in using the drive in their upcoming product offerings.

“The enterprise SSD market is now primed and well-positioned for growth from both a revenue and unit perspective, with Gartner estimating unit growth to double and sales to reach $1 billion for calendar 2010,” said Joseph Unsworth, Gartner researcher director, in a statement.  “Superior enterprise SSDs provide transformational capabilities when optimized in storage and server environments.”

Multiple-layer cell technology (MLC) is able to support more storage space than SLC drives, but the SLC drives typically have faster read/write speeds.

There are numerous companies promoting SSD products to consumers and businesses, but very few of them have the type of name recognition Seagate has.  Furthermore, the current manufacturers serving the enterprise SSD market aren’t able to meet production demands, which Seagate expects to be able to do with little trouble in 2010.

I believe since Seagate finally announced its first SSD product, many more similar product launches will take place in 2010.