What’s one sign of a tech market about to take off? Vendors who had previously shown no interest bowing their heads and entering the market. Case in point: Seagate, up until now a manufacturer of mechanical hard drives, has announced that it will enter the flash-based solid state drive market. Seagate chief exec Bill Watkins told the Wall Street Journal that the company will start shipping SSD products sometime next year, most likely starting with an enterprise line. “We have solid-state drives on every road map that we have,” Watkins said. What form will Seagate’s SSD products take? While, no one knows for sure, Watkins hinted that the company was likely to offer hybrid drives that use both flash memory and mechanical storage technology. It’s good to see yet another large vendor entering the market–the more competition there is, the lower prices will be.

For more on Seagate’s SSD move:
– see this Wall Street Journal article (sub. req.)