Hitachi GST and Intel make a solid-state deal

This week's agreement between Hitachi and Intel to jointly develop enterprise-class solid-state drives shows the industry's further movement to flash-type storage, but disk-based drives aren't dead tech yet.

Unlike Seagate, which announced last month that it would be setting forth on its SSD path solo, Hitachi and Intel are each doing the thing they do best in this case -- Intel building the SSD (solid-state drive) tech, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (the third largest drive vendor) selling it. The arrangement with Intel is exclusive for SATA and Fiber Channel SSDs.

Troy Winslow, director of marketing for the Intel NAND Solutions Group, says that having each partner stick to core competencies works out just fine for everybody.

"As we have proven with SATA SSDs," Winslow told BetaNews, "not all SSDs are created equal. And we have set a high standard for SSDs with respect to performance, power efficiency, and reliability, because of our deep understanding of flash memory and computing. We believe our partnership with Hitachi will allow them to also offer the same high standard in SAS and FC SSDs in addition to their complete HDD product offerings...We do not believe any one company can do it as well on their own."

Hitachi GST already knows a few things about partnering for flash memory in hard drives, as a founding member of the Hybrid Storage Alliance, along with such notables as Toshiba, Seagate, Western Digital, and flash memory leader Samsung. But that alliance is about using NAND flash as caches to support write operations to conventional ceramic; this deal with Intel is about solid-state disks only.

That's a market that Intel has already dipped its toes into, but not much more. It signaled its official entry into the market in March 2007, but restructuring forced it to shed much of its interests in flash memory technology, especially NOR. Last June, Intel denied it would be exiting the SSD market entirely -- after never having really entered it entirely -- but did not give further details. Now we know why: This deal was in the works.

Intel expects to have sampling well underway by the end of next year, with production happening in the first half of 2010. That's a whole lot of chips, but no worries about supply, says Winslow.

"Intel, through its IMFT [IM Flash Technologies, the Intel-Micron joint manufacturing venture] NAND manufacturing, has enough silicon capacity to not only support 100% of the Hitachi GST demand, but also fully support Intel's SATA SSDs and all our other NAND solutions and discrete NAND sales. This capacity will be based on the world's leading 34 nm silicon in production today, and transition to sub-30 nm technology in 2010."

This alliance could give a fully restructured Intel an avenue for re-entering a storage market that it was more than happy to set aside in 2004, at the brink of one of the roughest periods of its history.

The total amount of solid-state storage produced works out to more than 100 million gigabytes per quarter. Intel has been aggressively bumping up production on 34 nm NAND flash memory, announcing late in November that mass production is underway for its IMFT-developed 34 nm, 32-gigabit multi-level cell flash memory -- about 2000 photos, if you like, stored in a chip slightly smaller than your thumbnail and able to fit into the standard 48-lead thin small-outline integrated circuit package.

Scott M. Fulton, III contributed information to this story.