News Seagate joins enterprise SSD market

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/10/10/seagate-joins-enterprise-ssd-market/1

Seagate has confirmed rumours that, despite CEO Bill Watkins' public scorn of the technology, it is to enter the solid-state device marketplace with products aimed at the enterprise.

 

Surely for SSD to really get into the mainstream, they have to get round the relatively short IO lifespans - especially if they're targetting the enterprise market.

 

With wear leveling, it's really not that big of an issue unless you're running a write-heavy database. Most estimates these days seem to put them at least on par with, if not exceeding mechanical spindles for MTBF.

Price, on the other hand... they really should be performing at the maximum throughput of the interface unless they're going to rig up something very tricky with a modular in-drive RAID5 kind of system *ahem patent pending coughcough* (as opposed to RAID0 across each of the numerous memory chips) but even still really should be there. The fact that's not even happening combined with a much higher $/GB ratio means that unless you absolutely need the seek times and not so much on sustained transfer, it's not a great solution for most applications.

Speaking of which, where the hell is SATA3-600? It was supposed to hit in 2008, and while I don't pay that much attention to PC hardware releases these days that would have caught my eye.

 

Watkins' comments are not contradictory to Seagate's stated SSD strategy. He said SSD isn't ready to replace HDD as the storage device of choice for the laptop market, but that Seagate believes SSD could be a good fit for certain enterprise applications (i.e. Tier 0). Rich Vignes in the CNET story is talking about Seagate coming out with SSD solutions for the enterprise market. Same same.
WMonroy @ Seagate

 

There are enterprise level SSDs which have long lifespans. FusionIO being the biggest and best there is right now.

 

whatever happened to those hybrid hard drives that had some flash memory on them to store the OS and then the normal hard drive for everything else?

 

thay never realy worked that well Hybrid drives as most of them came with 256mb ram like hell that is going to be able to power down the hard disk needs to be 1/2gb min to work correctly