Seagate turns tables, enters solid-state disk drive market

What this means to the solid-state storage market: the 800-lb. gorilla has entered the room. Although entrenched competitors like Intel Corporation (INTC) and Samsung have a firm grip on the solid-state drive market, this is Seagate's only business.

Expect it to enter this market with a full bevy of offerings to compete heavily. As corporate servers and the like begin transitioning from platter-based drives to the kind that have diminished heat output, lower energy use, much faster performance and longer product lifetimes, Seagate wants to be the brand of choice. It's already there with the large storage customers with its disk drives, so the foot (many feet) are already in the door.

Seagate's Rich Vignes said that "SSDs provide superior dollars per IOP as compared to traditional hard drives," which is what the market knew years ago when Seagate was still clinging to its traditional platter hard drive business as strongly as possible. Although traditional hard drives die out completely in the next ten years, solid-state drives (SSDs) will most likely take over for every storage use from laptop PCs to DVRs to corporate servers.