Seagate: Who us... no flash cred? Check out our PCIe card, suckers

Seagate has opened up fresh fronts in its assault on the flash market and announced SATA and SAS SSDs as well as a PCIe flash card, signalling for the first time in a product sense just how serious it is about becoming a major league flash product supplier. There are basically four products: the 600, 600 Pro and 1200 SSDs and …

[Anonymous Coward]

Great as long as you don't use it much.

"the 480GB can have 72TB written to it over five years"

So it's only any good for archiving then?

My lad breaks through the 100GB per month on our 'unlimited' broadband regularly.

The future's bright, the future's a spinning platter!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Great as long as you don't use it much.

150GB/month (give or take) = 1800GB/year = 9000GB over 5 years. That's what... 9 TB? Doesn't come close to the 72TB yet... ;-)

[PineyCreek]

Seagate...

Not sure how they treat their enterprise folks, but there were two reasons I stopped buying Seagate 15 years ago: Their drives fail more than any other drives I've owned, and their customer service feels like you're dealing with the taxman.

[BornToWin]

I'm still waiting

I'm still waiting for fast PCIe flash cards at affordable prices for desktop PCs, not servers. This is a no brainer since most desktops have an unused PCIe socket. The performance easily exceeds the best SSD and it should costs the same or less to produce.

[N13L5]

Seagate...

The Samsung "relationship" can be ended very simply by Samsung selling its shares. They will not be interested in screwing up their own business to aid Seagate.

Next thing, customers don't like the effects of the extreme consolidation in the HDD market one bit, with its inherent price fixing (500GB drives today are more expensive than they were 7 years ago, never returned to pre-flood levels).

Adding Seagate's sleazy business practices, their heaps of clattering, unreliable drives, I think you will find few customers who want them to become dominant in SSDs.

Its similar to Microsoft: customers instinctively don't want them to extend their monopoly to tablets and phones, so they stay away from the product, inspite of the massive evangelizing Microsoft has paid for.

The only thing welcome will be additional pricing pressure to the overall market. If Seagate forces down prices a bit, people will happily buy more Micron, Intel and Samsung drives. OEMs will be a vector for Seagate though, since most spec sheets fail to list the brand of SSD used, you might end up with one without knowing it.