Seagate Skips SSDs

We’ve been rather impressed with Seagate hard drives. We still use IDE Western Digital drives (WD800BEVE, 1600BEVE, and 2500BEVE) in our E2s on account of their quietness, minimal power consumption (about 1 additional watt) and general reliability. But our new Atom PC runs on SATA-II and what’s more our forthcoming E3 likely will as well.

Seagate has made some great inroads with their new 7200.3 series. Low power, a bit noisy, 7200 RPM, and 16MB Cache. It has 80MB/sec read speed and 50MB/sec write speed - that’s way above CF cards and approaching SSD levels.

As they announced today in London, they’re skipping the market. To quote Bill Watson, “When Samsung can’t make money at this… it’s a tough market.”

Of course, we’re happy to take advantage of loss leaders and will be announcing the Atom PC with 32GB OCZ SSD (Ubuntu or Vista) next week