Seagate and Samsung to Co-Develop Controller For Enterprise SSDs
Based on 30nm MLC NAND
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on August 13, 2010 at 3:32 pmSeagate Technology plc and Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. have entered into a joint development and licensing agreement.
Under the agreement, the two companies will jointly develop and cross-license related controller technologies for solid state drive (SSD) storage devices to attain the high levels of performance, reliability and endurance demanded by enterprise storage applications.
The joint development effort builds on the existing SSD capabilities of each company while combining Seagate’s leadership in enterprise storage technology with Samsung’s flash memory technology specific to 30 nanometer-class MLC NAND. The jointly developed controller will be utilized in Seagate’s enterprise-class SSDs.
“Seagate has long recognized that solid state technology has an important role to play in the comprehensive solutions the storage industry will deliver today and in the future, particularly in the enterprise market,” said Steve Luczo, Seagate chairman, president and CEO. “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. Overall, this agreement with Samsung strengthens our SSD solutions strategy, and positions Seagate well as global demand for storage continues on its strong growth path.”
“We are pleased to be jointly developing a high-performance SSD controller with Seagate for the enterprise storage market,” said Dr. Changhyun Kim, senior vice president and Samsung Fellow, Memory product planning & application engineering, Semiconductor Business, Samsung Electronics. “Our green memory solution is designed to enable more energy-efficient server applications, which is expected to increase the use of NAND-based SSD storage in enterprise applications.”
Comments
Samsung is competing with Seagate in desktop and notebook HDDs but this
agreement on flash could be a win-win operation.
Seagate has already developed its own controller for enterprise SSDs on
its Pulsar model (SLC, 3Gb SATA) and Samsung is mainly a strong actor in
flash drives for PCs, even if it announced last year a 2.5-inch SLC
100GB SSD for servers. Here the idea is to have a controller for
enterprise devices - probably with SAS interface - based on Samsung 30nm
MLC (not SLC more expensive and actually generally used for high-end drives) and
Seagate's expertise in error recovery, to be available by mid-2012.
Seagate signed with LSI to get enterprise SAS SSD units but using
PCIe connection. Samsung is an investor in Fusion-io, manufacturer of
PCIe-based SSDs.
STEC is the current leader in enterprise SLC SSDs and SandForce a specialist of controllers for high performance MLC drives.
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