The Japanese electronics conglomerate Hitachi has recently announced that it will jointly produce Solid State Drives (SSD) with chipmaker Intel.

The SSDs are memory devices which are seen as a good alternative for HDDs (Hard Disk Drives). Hitachi is the world's third-largest hard drive maker, one that hasn't used the SSD technology never before. The solid state drives are mainly used in laptop PCs, and that's because they absorb shocks better and consume less power than hard disk drives, two essential characteristics for a laptop user.

According to the agreement, Intel will basically manufacture the SSDs and Hitachi will sell them, with the first shipment planned for 2010. However, it seems that Hitachi will not follow its rivals, such as Toshiba, in targeting laptop PCs and other consumer-based applications.

Its SSDs will be destined for business use, like in servers and computer storage systems. Furthermore, the Japanese conglomerate says it will continue to sell hard disk drives, because they think these devices will continue to see demand growth in applications where large data storage is required.

Shinjiro Iwata, executive vice president of strategic business operations at Hitachi GST, told the media: "We understand the needs of today's enterprise customers and are committed to delivering breakthrough products that increase their data center performance and reduce total cost of ownership.”

Hitachi will use Intel's NAND flash inside of its drives and both Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and Fiber Channel (FC) drives will be designed, according to the two companies. Intel has also announced its own, low-cost SSD in June.

The new drives will be branded and exclusively sold and supported by Hitachi, while Intel will also continue to develop, market and sell its SATA SSDs. All in all, it seems like another partnership between two major companies with benefits not only for them, but for the customers too.