Seagate Gets Set to Leap
Into Flash-Drive Arena
By DON CLARK
August 23, 2007; Page B4
Seagate Technology, the big maker of disk drives, is often asked how it will cope with competition from chips known as flash memory. Now it is answering -- with plans to exploit that technology, too.
Bill Watkins, Seagate's chief executive, disclosed in an interview that the company will enter the market next year for devices that store data on flash chips, while still mainly relying on products based on spinning magnetic disks. More and more flash-based devices, sometimes called solid-state drives, will gradually be added to Seagate's product lineup, he said.
"We have solid-state drives on every road map that we have," Mr. Watkins said yesterday.
Flash chips, known for their use in digital cameras and portable music players, have several advantages for such applications. With no moving parts, they can be bumped and jostled and still keep operating. They can transfer data quickly and consume relatively little power.
Flash chips are more costly than disk drives, however. For example, Dell Inc. in April announced plans to sell a solid-state drive, priced at $549, with a storage capacity of 32 billion bytes, or gigabytes. By contrast, Seagate in June said it would charge $399 for a drive with more than 30 times that capacity; it can hold about a trillion bytes, or a terabyte.
Mr. Watkins noted that Seagate has tracked the flash market for years. It held and later sold a 40% stake, for example, in SanDisk Corp., a maker of flash-based storage devices whose market value is now close to that of Seagate's.
Seagate, of Scotts Valley, Calif., is not giving any details about any flash-based products now. But besides devices that exclusively use disks or chips to store data, Mr. Watkins said the company is likely to offer various kinds of "hybrid" products that use both.
"We intend to be very agnostic," Mr. Watkins said.
Besides discussing product plans, Mr. Watkins disclosed that he has begun talking to U.S. government officials about ways that agencies could help domestic drive makers such as Seagate. His company already faces stiff competition from companies in Japan and South Korea that get various forms of government assistance, he said. China also could emerge as a major force in drive technology, which is strategically important to the U.S. government, Mr. Watkins argued.
Write to Don Clark at
[email protected]