Rumors have suggested that Seagate has been working on the development of solid state drive products for some time, but it seems that the company is investing more than $100 million into the effort.

Sources suggest that Seagate is working on a wide range of SSD products and several of our sources suggest that the company has developed a hybrid technology that is able to combine the SLC and MLC technology into a NAND SSD solution that is cost effective and improves read/write performance.

Beyond the company’s preparation for its plunge into the SSD market space, the company also is working on the development of NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices for home users. The company realizes that these solutions are becoming even more popular and necessary with the increase that users have had in data storage requirements.

With all of the consolidation that has taken place in the storage market space and the increased popularity of SSD solutions that by all accounts are still in their infancy in both price and performance, hard drive manufacturers have had to branch into other market segments to gain additional sales and keep products fresh beyond just producing higher capacity hard drives.

So far, the major hard drive players who have ventured into the flash memory space have done so with little success. In addition, the development of hybrid hard drive solutions with flash memory on them has not delivered the kind of performance increase that many would have hoped.

Still, SSD solutions seem to be a very popular item right now, but the cost has scared consumers away. The thing is, however, that many ultra-cheap notebooks and ultra-portables are now offering this as part of their storage solutions.

The development has attracted traditional hard drive manufacturers like Seagate to step up their efforts in SSD development to make sure that they are on the cutting edge and not left behind as the market moves forward.