•  
• EDN Europe MAGAZINE
•  
• Free SUBSCRIPTION
• Subscription Renewal
• View Media Kit

• EDN
• EDN Australia
• EDN Asia
• EDN China
• EDN Japan

Solid-state-drive counter attack packs a two part punch

What does Seagate, the largest harddisk- drive manufacturer, do when it’s late for the inevitable transition from hard disks to solid-state drives? The company recently revealed its strategy for answering that question, announcing a two-part plan. Seagate unveiled 160- and 250-Gbyte hard-disk drives, the fi rst two members of its 7-mm-wide, 2.5-in. Momentus Slim family, and released Pulsar, its fi rst product offering in the solid-state-drive category.

The Momentus Slim drives feature 8-Mbyte RAM buffers, 3-Gbps SATA (serial-advanced-technology attachment) system interfaces, and 5400-rpm rotational speeds. The company provides no architectural or pricing details, although the devices are most likely single-platter designs. With the units, Seagate is competing with 1.8-in. harddisk drives from competitors such as Samsung (www. samsung.com) and Toshiba (www.toshiba.com), 2.5-in. hard drives from all suppliers, and fl ash-memory-based mass storage in various form factors.

Although Momentus Slim is thinner than a conventional 9.5-mm hard-disk drive and even thinner than some three-platter, 12.5-mm configurations, it does not enjoy guaranteed market success because it is currently a solesourced product and because it’s a rotating magnetic hard disc—albeit one that delivers attractive capacity and dollar-per-gigabyte metrics. It thus burns a notable amount of power and has reliability challenges.

Meanwhile, Seagate is shipping Pulsar to customers for qualifi cation. The company based Pulsar on SLC (single-levelcell) fl ash-memory technology, thereby delivering faster writes than MLC (multilevel-cell) alternatives—at a dollar-pergigabyte trade-off—and aimed at enterprise applications.

Seagate, www.seagate.com.