Seagate: 90 percent of laptops to use SSDs within 5 years

Storage firm Seagate says it expects hard disk drives will continue to co-exist with solid state disks for the foreseeable future. The company is making more moves into the SSD market by making acquisitions and forming strategic alliances, but will continue to invest resources to make its HDDs better.

DigiTimes writes Seagate senior vice president of global sales BS Teh said the company expects as much as 90 percent of new laptops will feature a SSD within the next five years:

Teh expects nearly 90% of worldwide notebooks shipped to feature built-in SSDs within next five years. Demand for SSDs is likely to replace a large proportion of HDD demand, and Seagate will become more aggressive in its development of SSDs. However, the company will continue to put resources into HDD R&D as the larger storage capacity of HDDs will still allow the product line to enjoy market demand.

Seagate recently spent US$450 million to acquire the flash business of LSI, an affiliate of Avago, and has already shipped over 20 million SSDs. Seagate is planning to launch a 60TB SSD in 2017.

It took many years but both Seagate and Western Digital have stepped up their game. Especially Western Digital is now a pretty big name in the flash market as its acquisition of SanDisk gave it a large foothold.