InsaneTek

Seagate, a well-known storage solutions company, and DensBits, a not-so-well-known company who is touted as the inventor of the first "Memory Modem," have teamed up to make worse SSDs better. The "Memory Modem" is a special SSD controller that apparently improves performance of lower-priced SSDs by quite a bit. Seagate invested a not-released amount of money in DensBits so they could use this "revolutionary" controller with their own SSDs. With it, Seagate can take lower-priced flash memory and make it performance like higher-priced flash memory.

Seagate's chief sales and marketing officer, Rocky Pimentel, said:

For the last 30 years, Seagate has delivered technology and product innovation to become the global leader in storage solutions, from high-end enterprise drives to solid-state hybrid drives. Seagate is excited to be working with the talented DensBits team and believes we have a significant opportunity with our new strategic relationship to extend our leadership into the SSD market.

DensBits' memory controller will be used with 1Xnm TLC (triple level cell) NAND memory for consumers, and 1Xnm MLC (multi-level cell) NAND memory for enterprise drives. Like I said, the basic idea is to throw DensBits' controller on lower-priced NAND memory to make performance better while driving costs down. According to OCZ wholesale prices, TLC memory per gigabyte is $2.40 cheaper than SLC (single level cell) memory, and $0.30 cheaper than MLC memory. SLC memory is priced (wholesale) at $3.00/gigabyte, with MLC and TLC priced at $0.90 and $0.60, respectively. 

Read the press release here.