Western Digital is on a roll and is shipping more harddrives than any other company, especially competitor Seagate. It has also entered the SSD market, but not entirely convinced the retail market is ready yet, and instead puts faith in Hybrid harddrives, something Seagate has already ventured into.
WD has the same base idea as Seagate and says that SSDs are still too expensive for the larger group of users and instead it will supply computers with a small SSD or joining the technologies into one drive.
Seagate has already launched the first hybrid harddrives in the form of Momentus XT, a mechanical harddrive sporting 500GB capacity with 4GB SLC NAND flash. The flash memory becomes a large memory cache that stores frequently accessed data and speeds up both booting and application start-ups.
“We also continue to evaluate the opportunity to combine rotating magnetic storage with flash into hybrid solutions. […] [At present] we look at client environment and look at what might be an attractive offering that combine the best of both worlds in terms of the performance of solid state with the capacity of rotating media, […] which [would] provide an accessible price point,”
Whether WD will launch its own hybrid harddrives isn’t certain, but it mentioned during a conference call that it will follow the path of the consumers.
Source: SeekingAlpha via X-bit Labs
