July 23, 2007
Seagate boss says new drives are too flashy
Could all the fuss about solid-state drives for laptops be a flash in the pan?
Bill Watkins, chief executive of Seagate Technology, the world’s biggest hard drive maker, thinks it is, but then he has every reason to want flash drives in notebook PCs to flop.
Japanese analysts have predicted that 64-gigabyte flash memory chips could start to replace standard hard-disk drives in laptops in 2009 as their price falls below $120. Toshiba has announced a massive expansion of Nand flash production to take advantage of the trend.
Flash has no moving parts, so it is faster, lighter and needs less power than a hard drive, making it an ideal alternative for laptops.
But Mr Watkins, talking to us after Seagate announced full-year earnings, pooh-poohs the idea.
“[Microsoft’s Windows] Vista takes about 18-19Gbs to load, if you buy a notebook with a 32Gb [flash] drive, you don’t really want a notebook, you want an MP3 player and a pencil and paper,” he says.
The forthright Mr Watkins recalls giving a speech recently to industry executives in Tokyo and asking for a show of hands on who had one of the new flash-drive laptops made by companies such as Samsung. No one did.
In the last quarter, his average hard-drive size supplied for laptops was 100Gb and he feels consumers choosing between same-priced 64Gb flash drives and 250Gb hard drives in a few years’ time will go for the extra storage.
Mr Watkins predicts the next storage technology that is likely to emerge will be a hybrid one, combining flash chips with their power-saving and performance features with the cost-per-gigabyte and greater reliability benefits of hard drives. Seagate began shipping its first hybrid drive in the second quarter.
