Seagate Moving to Solid-State Enterprise Drives in 2009

Have you made the jump to solid-state yet ? Probably not, due to pricing – but they are out there, and not cheap.

A few months back Seagate revealed that they would start selling enterprise based Solid-State Drives (SSD) some time in 2009.

Some industry experts believe that selling the Solid-State idea to industry IT managers will be difficult because there is currently no clear and cut way to describe endurance or life expectancy of SSD’s. Seagate is currently working on this problem with JEDEC standards body.

Rich Vignes, senior manager of market development 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.”

With time, SSDs will catch on since they offer much better mean time between failures (MTBF) than standard mechanical based hard drives, they generate much less heat, require much less power, and can also be compacted into a smaller form factor as well. This presents many attractive key qualities for SSDs – the trick now is to deploy and convince the industry to make the move.

Quoting Gregory Wong, an industry analyst at Forward Insights, said, “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 and Facebook.”

As it currently stands, consumers won’t be going mainstream with SSD any time soon at all. Prices may continue to trickle on the downward slope, but don’t expect leaps and bounds just yet. Let the enterprise market play out first.