Seagate to make flash-based hard drives
Seagate Technology, the number one maker of magnetic hard drives, is going to make hard drives based around flash memory too, says CEO Bill Watkins.
"We are going to have a solid state drive, probably for enterprise first," he said during an interview on Wednesday. "We think we can make these drives better."
Seagate's decision is a significant turning point in the religious war in the storage market. The flash versus magnetic debate has been issue No. 1 in the storage world for the past two years. Magnetic hard drives have been a crucial component for servers, PCs and notebooks for years. Magnetic hard drives cost far less in terms of cost per gigabyte and typically hold more data than flash devices. At CompUSA, a 500GB desktop drive on sale sells for $109, or as much as two 4GB flash drives. The price disparity exists at wholesale too.
Flash memory makers, however, have been increasing the density of their products and lowering the price. In turn, flash has managed to chase magnetic hard drives out of the MP3 player market. Notebooks with flash drives began appearing this year. Some flash manufacturers say blade servers are next. Flash consumes less energy, say proponents, is more reliable and faster at retrieving data.
Rather than try to fight the trend, Seagate is going to cover all the bases. Besides, the storage component--flash chips or magnetic platters--are only one component of a drive, said Watkins. There are also chips, boards and lots of software.
"This has a million lines of code in it," Watkins said, holding up a hard drive. "The million lines of code make it a solution."
The flash-based notebooks on the market today, he said, are "ten years behind."
Seagate doesn't have flash-based drives in the wings at the moment. Right now, the Scotts Valley-based company is looking for a company to sell it flash chips.
Samsung is the number one producer of NAND flash in the world, but Samsung also sells hard drives. Still, there are many other vendors, including Micron Technologies, which don't make their own drives.
Flash drives will likely never dominate the storage market. There's just too much data out there, said Watkins. But flash drives might account for 7 or so percent of the drive market, he speculated.
The opportunity for flash drives will mostly be in the 400GB to 500GB space a few years from now. Currently, 64GB flashed-based drives for notebooks cost a few hundred dollars.
In 2012, 500GB might cost $50 while 50GB of flash might sell for the same, he said.
Seagate currently makes hybrid drives, which are regular magnetic drives with some flash included.
Interestingly, Seagate once owned a big piece of flash giant SanDisk.
So in 2012 the biggest drives out there will probably something like 4 terabytes, but I'll probably only need 500GB. If it comes down to a 500GB fast flash drive vs. a 1TB slower magnetic drive for the same price, I'm gonna be getting the flash drive.
I don't think I'm abnormal in this regard either. I download large files, have lots of programs, games, etc. My disk usage isn't the most intensive out there, but probably in line with 50%+ of computer users, and that's at home! At the office I use even less disk space (I think I've got an 80GB drive that isn't even half full since any important stuff gets stored to the network RAID array with it's regular backups).
interface will never matter, nobody will ever need more than 640k,
linux will never be a viable option, and Apple will never matter in
the computer world again.
....have we STILL not learned that never is a long time?
and in computer years no less.
And your comparison is very flawed. Other than speed differences that the average user won't notice, there's no difference in the quality of the storage. It still holds the same data, at the same quality, except magnetic still holds more.
Thus why the iPod video is still hard disk based.. with 80GB. Can flash even do that? Not without tripling the price of the product.
Neither needs that much programming.
- a million lines of code ... why?
- by hubbertsmith March 23, 2008 1:58 PM PDT
- a million lines of code sounds more like bloatware than "a solution" ...
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(12 Comments)exactly what type of "solution" are we talking about? what precisely are the customer benefits of this "solution"? does the "solution" benefit customers or does the "solution" benefit seagate?