SEAGATE CEO Bill Watkins said his Seagate will bring in the company’s first Solid State Drive and 2 Terabyte hard drive next year.

"The first SSD product will be targeted at enterprises that need speedy storage and can afford to pay a premium for the expensive drives," he told IDG. "Seagate has no plans to release SSD drives for consumers as the high prices could deter them for the next few years”.

He boldly added: “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.”

Although that last line led to some confusion and controversy, which was cleared up in another post making a retraction/clarification – “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 for top-tier enterprises”. The first version could have easily scared the world in to remortgaging its house just for a 1TB drive, so we’re glad they made his point much clearer.

Seagate does already ship an SSD drive of sorts, seen within its hybrid drive – the Momentus. This combines both NAND flash with a traditional platter based-storage – in an effort to reduce power consumption and improve on boot times.

Watkins said Seagate's SSD would be mainly for data centres that rely on processing data quickly,. "Solid-state drives can move data up to 10 times quicker than hard drives, but data has to ultimately be moved to larger and more reliable storage”, Watkins said.

There were no finalised release dates or and pricing information discussed in the interview, but it’s refreshing to have Seagate step up to the plate with these fairly neck-on-the-line bold statements.

Hitachi was first out of the starting gate with the 1 Terabyte drive. Traditionally we’d now expect to see the latest company with the highest density per platter to be the first with a 2TB solution. We guess we’ll just have to wait and see who appears first. µ