by Brooke Crothers
October 9, 2008 6:00 AM PDT

The largest hard-disk drive maker is going solid-state. Slowly. Seagate will enter the market for solid-state drives in 2009, as it slowly embraces a technology that will, in some cases, replace its bread and butter: hard disks.

"Our history is based on rotating magnetic media. But as solid-state comes online, we're embracing this new media type," said Rich Vignes, senior manager of market development at the Scotts Valley, Calif.-based company. Seagate's first target market will be large enterprise customers. Consumer SSDs from Seagate will come later. The challenge is to convince large enterprise customers that SSDs are safe.

Although hard-disk drives have endurance problems of their own, corporate customers must be convinced that a technology as new as solid-state storage is reliable. "There isn't really a clear way of describing endurance or life expectancy of a solid-state drive. So, we're working on that as an industry standard," through JEDEC, a large standard body, Vignes said. The presence of large players such as Seagate will allay fears, he believes.

"As companies like Seagate start to demonstrate field-proven reliability and endurance in enterprise applications, we'll overcome those (solid-state drive) endurance fears." Analysts are bullish that, with time, SSDs will catch on. "SSDs offer much better MTBFs (mean time between failures) than HDDs, although the endurance is an issue that has to be addressed," said Gregory Wong, an industry analyst at Forward Insights.