Hard drive giant Seagate Technology is investing $40 million in solid-state newcomer Virident.

It's part of a strategic deal that will immediately have Seagate selling Virident's flash-based PCIe storage products to its OEMs and distribution network under its own brand.

Seagate, which has previously only sold serial-SCSI-based SSDs and hybrid drives with spinning disks as well as flash, also plans to develop new flash-based storage products with Virident.

It will get a seat on the six-year-old company's board.

"This partnership validates Virident's vision of pervasive flash in the performance tier and accelerates our shared vision by bringing next-generation SCM solutions to the enterprise and web datacenters worldwide," Virident CEO Mike Gustafson said in a statement.

Virident has previously gotten $63 million from backers such as Intel, Cisco, Mitsui Global Investment, Globespan Capital Partners, Sequoia Capital and Artiman Ventures.

Separately, Seagate reported a fiscal second-quarter profit of $492 million, or $1.30 a share, on $3.7 billion in revenue. The results were better than the $1.27 analysts had expected. The company also said it shipped 58 million disk-drive units in the December quarter. "Seagate is executing well in an environment where customer demand forecasting is challenging," Steve Luczo, Seagate's CEO, said in a statement.