Bill Watkins, CEO of Seagate Technology, announced yesterday that the company would begin developing flash-based hard drives. Seagate, the number one manufacturer of magnetic hard drives, has until now shied away from manufacturing and selling Solid State Drives (SSD). However with many companies entering the solid state drive market and more customers asking for such storage devices, Seagate felt it necessary to cover all of it’s bases. Watkins announced that that the initial solid state drives would probably be targeted towards the enterprise market with people care about performance, reliability, and power consumption. 

Flash storage has long been used in devices such as USB flash keys and MP3 players. Recently more and more notebook manufacturers have been including options for SSD add-ons that are basically drop-in replacements of regular notebook hard drives. Unfortunately SSD drives are still much more expensive than regular hard drives but prices are expected to fall over the next several years.

What will be interesting to see is where Seagate gets their flash memory chips. Samsung is the largest produce of NAND flash memory but the company is also a hard drive competitor to Seagate. Seagate could go to many other vendors including the likes of Micron Technologies.

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