The well known HDD manufacturer Seagate has made a general announcement that SSDs are not worth building a NAND flash fabrication plant for, which means that while Seagate may produce SSD products, it will instead focus heavily on mass producing hard disks including its hybrid disk solution.
While mobile phones, flash memory cards and pen drives all use NAND flash, Seagate does not produce these products and thus with the current very limited sales of SSD equipped laptops, Seagate does not see it worth investing in a NAND flash fabrication plant where they predict would cost it far more than the annual revenue it would get out of it.
This does make sense, since while SSD freaks will understand the huge benefit of having an SSD in a laptop, the average consumer would think twice of spending $/€200 extra on a new laptop for what appears like a tiny capacity and who does not realise what benefit SSD has to offer. Another way to think of it is that most during the height of Vista, most laptops were sold with just 1GB of RAM, as consumers would rather buy a laptop that is $/€50 cheaper than one with more RAM.
On the other hand, it’s nice to see Seagate committed to developing hybrid drives, as these are no gimmick. While not as fast as true SSDs, they outperform the fastest consumer hard disks in many areas, with a price closer to a HDD than an equivalent capacity SSD.
