My suspicion is that the SATA SSD market is already largely commoditised — decent stability is assumed rather than rewarded (with any blatant lack being punished) and margins are thin (and becoming razor thin). Seagate’s contacts may get them some big (e.g. OEM or corporate) orders, but only at the cost of cutting the margins even finer. Large clients also have large rolodexes of suppliers prepared to underbid each other. Having delayed their launch this long, will they recoup their R&D costs? I somewhat doubt it.

Gen2x2 does not offer much of a real-world benefit over SATA, so what little market there is for it is likely to evaporate when Gen3x4 becomes mainstream. This process will also further fuel the commoditisation of SATA-SSD, as premium products migrate to the faster technology.

You only get to make a substantial profit by offering something that nobody else (or only a few others) have got. That’s basic economics. “A very large client base” gets your foot in the door, it does not however get you a sale unless the price is right.

Running that route would have been the SandForce we all knew a few years back. SandForce needed stability after being bought by LSI, Avago and now Seagate. Seagate has a very large client base as well as many other relationships that have been honed throughout the years. What they will bring to SandForce is a strong validation process and then guaranteed client base, even before we start seeing their product in retail sales. Heck, all that Seagate needs now is to develop their own NAND flash memory…or purchase a NAND manufacturer. No one doubts they are capable of such.

The problem is that they really needed that “next gen” now, if they wanted to catch the Skylake M2 wave. Sandforce is clearly losing the technological “Red Queen’s race” (where you need to innovate merely to survive, let alone succeed).

I would be very surprised if many (any) enterprise products would use either “SATA or PCIe Gen2 x2” — older ones would use SAS, newer would use PCIe with far more lanes than 2.

Thanks… I was think concurrent!!!