Well known hard drive making company Seagate Technology is easing further into the solid state drive market. It has been announced that the company will acquire a stake in DensBits Technologies to help develop low-cost, fast and reliable SSDs.
Seagate spent $1.4 billion last year on an acquisition of Samsung Electronics’ hard drive business which brought it some useful SSD tech knowhow and component supplies. Seagate are trying not to fall behind in the fixed disk mass storage market in which the new NAND flash SSD manufacturers are gaining share. In order to still use its traditional HDD tech and manufacturing the company has been producing hybrid SSD/HDD drives offering benefits of both technologies in a single unit. These are especially useful in a laptop for example, where you have only room for one drive but want SSD speed with the greater HDD capacity and affordability.
DensBits is an Israel based tech company with an interesting IP called the ‘Memory Modem’ controller. This technology is said to allow manufacturers to get better performance and reliability out of cheaper NAND flash storage chips. The Chief Executive of DensBits, Ilan Hen, thinks Seagate could make a very big impact on the market when the first products start becoming available from this partnership “This is yet another testament to our technology leadership, and we strongly believe that the coupling between DensBits’ unique Memory Modem controller technology and Seagate’s exceptional storage capabilities across the board could truly disrupt the industry.”
The capacities and prices of SSDs are becoming more and more attractive all the time but I can’t wait to see what an industry disruption does to the prices. Also more reliability is always welcome. Seagate did not comment on the size of the stake or the investment made in DensBits.
