Seagate expands production into the solid state drive (SSD) area

Seagate the well known manufacturer of hard drives , external hard drives, and other storage devices has expanded into the growing new Solid State Drive SSD business.

The expansion shows an interest into taking advantage of the growing demand for the more modern solid state drives (SSD) over traditional hard disk drives (HDD).

Solid State Drives (SSD)

Wikipedia describes SSD's as follows: "A solid-state drive (SSD) is a solid-state storage device that uses integrated circuit assemblies as memory to store data persistently. It is also sometimes called solid-state disk,.. for historical reasons. SSD technology primarily uses electronic interfaces compatible with traditional block input/output (I/O) hard disk drives (HDDs), which permit simple replacements in common applications. New I/O interfaces like M.2 and U.2 have been designed to address specific requirements of the SSD technology. "

Unlike traditional hard disk drives or floppy disks, the SSD's have no moving mechanical parts such as spinning disks. They are more resistant to physical shock, run silently, and have quicker access time. Although the price of SSD's has come down considerably from when they were first issued, they are still relatively more expensive per storage unit than traditional HDDs. Still many are upgrading computers to SSD because of their advantages over traditional HDDs. However, SSDs are not suitable for keeping archival material.

The BarraCuda SSD

The new SSD is not the newer faster NVMe drive but a relatively basic SATA drive. However, it will still be a viable option for a desktop. The capacities of the BarraCuda begin at 250GB and range all the way up to 2TB. One virtue of the drives is that they are not too expensive. The 250GB is $74, and the 1 TB model is on sale for 229.99.

As of now, the BarraCuda is on a limited release sale at Amazon but in September it will be available elsewhere.

Seagate

Seagate Technology PLC is a US data storage company. It was incorporated way back in 1978 as Shugar Technology. However, since 2010 the company has been incorporated in Dublin Ireland. However, it operational headquarters are in the United States at Cupertino California.

The current board chair is Stephen Luczo. Luczo was previously president and CEO from 1998 to 2004. On October 2 last year David Mosley was appointed CEO as Luczo relinquished that role.

As of 2017 the company had 41,000 employees.

Last year in August Seagate already unveiled the largest SSD in the world 60 TB.

Previously published in Digital Journal