Seagate and Samsung, the two major makers of hard drives and system memory, announced Thursday that they have entered into a joint development and licensing agreement.
Under this agreement, the two companies will develop and cross-license related controller technologies for solid state drives.
This is interesting; Samsung has released many consumer-grade SSDs, whereas Seagate has recently taken the route of hybrid drive with the release of the Seagate Momentus XT (500GB). The company’s first attempt into the SSD market with the Pulsar drive didn’t make much of a splash.
According to Seagate, however, the two companies aim to develop new SSDs for the enterprise storage market, of which Seagate has been a strong player with traditional platter-based hard drives.
Steve Luczo, Seagate’s chairman, president, and CEO said, “Today’s agreement with Samsung will help us bring a compelling set of SSD innovations to the enterprise storage market, with benefits that range from enhanced performance, endurance, and reliability to cost and capacity improvements.”
Seagate says that the joint development will build on the existing SSD capabilities of each company while combining Seagate’s enterprise storage technology with Samsung’s 30 nanometer-class MLC NAND flash memory technology. Seagate will then use the jointly developed controller for its enterprise-class SSDs.
The first SSDs based on this joint development is expected to be available by the middle of 2012.
Source CNET