Seagate hooks up with Samsung to create SSDs

PLATTER SPINNER Seagate has announced that it will work with Samsung to produce controller boards for enterprise solid state drives (SSD).

The hook-up sees two storage powerhouses work together in trying to crack the enterprise SSD market. Samsung, the world's largest DRAM and NAND flash manufacturer will be offering its 30nm chips to Seagate for use in its enterprise SSDs.

Seagate, still the largest maker of hard drives, will look to trade on its brand name, built by peddling its legendary 'Cheetah' range of SCSI and SAS hard drives. The firm says that working with Samsung will allow them to create controllers for drives that can "attain the high levels of performance, reliability and endurance demanded by enterprise storage applications".

While Seagate pushes its enterprise credentials, Samsung is far more keen to tout the energy efficiencies that SSDs bring. Dr. Changhyun Kim, senior vice president and Samsung Fellow said, "Our green memory solution is designed to enable more energy-efficient server applications, which is expected to increase the use of NAND-based SSD storage in enterprise applications."

Hard drive manufacturers such as Seagate and Western Digital have been slow to embrace SSDs as they look to milk traditional hard drives for every last penny. While Samsung makes hard drives, it tends to concentrate on the consumer market and was quick to jump onto the SSD bandwagon.

SSDs have characteristics which make them particularly conducive to servers. Low latency means that SSDs are able to attain high I/O operations per second (IOPS) and with low power consumption, it allows more drives to be shoved into the rack.

This announcement is the clearest indication yet that hard drive manufacturers are finally moving on from mechanical platter drives and looking forward rather than going around in circles. µ