During a press even earlier this week got a chance to talk to harddrive manufacturer Western Digital and of course we moved into Solid State Drives territory, but also the new storage interface SATA 6Gb/s. WD who know owns SSD company SiliconSystems are active on the SSD market, but so far only for only in the business segment. Unfortunately it will stay that way until 2011 since it does not expect any major increase in sales any time soon.
It made it perfectly clear, over and over, that WD does not enter markets where there are no significant sales volumes. It will hold off going retail until the market has grown large enough, according to WD's standard.
With its retail SSD plans on ice it we can understand that there are no real plans for the SATA 6Gb/s standard. It referred to the mediocre results that from the reviews of main competitor Seagate and its first SATA 6Gb/s model, Barracuda XT, which has failed to impress anyone.
WD doesn't seem to think SATA 6Gbps has anything to offer at the moment and even if this more due to the harddrive technology than the actual interface the conclusion is quite easy to draw, as long as it won't enter the retail SSD market there is little reason to care for SATA 6Gbps.
WD is playing it cool and even if we can understand the reasoning, 2011 feels a bit late to start up the retail launch. We presume this is not set in stone, but it could be good to show some sparks before it really enters the market. We know for a fact that WD believes in the technology and keeps improving its Solid State constantly.
Currently WD is the harddrive company that is doing best and recently revealed a quarterly fiscal report with record results.
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WD holding off retail SSD and SATA 6Gbps
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