Seagate To Begin Shipping Third-Generation SSHD Storage Products

Earlier this week we mentioned that Seagate had announced it would be discontinuing its entire 7200 RPM laptop hard drive family. At the time, it may have seemed that Seagate was getting out of the high-end market when it comes to notebooks and other mobile devices. However, Seagate has now announced that it is ready to launch its third-generation laptop SSHDs.

A SSHD is a solid-state hybrid drive that combines the speed of an SSD with the storage capacity of a hard drive. Seagate says that these SSHDs are up to five times faster than a standard 5400 RPM notebook hard drives. The drives are able to boot a laptop in under 10 seconds.

Seagate offers laptop versions of the SSHD with up to 1 TB of storage capacity and a 500 GB version that is only 7 mm high called the Laptop Thin SSHD. That drive is appropriate for the most ultra thin and sleek laptops available. Seagate is also rolling out a Desktop SSHD with up to 2 TB of storage combined with 8 GB of NAND Flash.

The Desktop SSHD allows a desktop computer to boot up in seconds and run the user's favorite applications much faster than a traditional hard drive. Seagate claims that the Desktop SSHD will perform up to four times faster than a typical hard drive based storage device. These drives overcome the problem of high cost for a pure SSD and low capacity compared to a traditional hard drive. Seagate offers no indication of when products using these new SSHDs will hit the market.

[via Seagate]