Last August, announced an agreement for Seagate to base its SSDs on Samsung's 32 nanometer (nm) NAND flash circuit technology. For example, Seagate's refresh of the Pulsar line, the Pulsar XT.2, is based on Samsung's NAND flash.

Last year, the market for enterprise-class SSDs was around $850 million, while the market for consumer-class or client SSDs was about $1.3 billion, said IDC analyst Jeff Janukowicz. Next year, the enterprise-class SSD market is expected to grow to $1.8 billion and the consumer-class SSD business to over $2 billion.

Recent consolidation in the hard drive industry, which includes , means there are only three major players left, including Toshiba.

"I think there will still be plenty of competition between the three remaining players. Ninety percent of the market will be split pretty much evenly between Western Digital and Seagate, with Toshiba playing in some niche opportunities," said John Webster, a senior partner at market research firm Evaluator Group.

Webster believes the HDD market consolidation is being driven by two converging forces; price drops in non-volatile memory used in SSDs, which offers vastly higher performance than HDD; and the fact that manufacturers believe "the mechanical disk has hit a performance wall relative to continuing gains in processor performance.