Seagate will introduce its first SSD (solid-state drive) storage and 2T-byte
hard drive next year, company CEO Bill Watkins said.

The company's first SSD product will be targeted at enterprises that need speedy
storage and can afford to pay a premium for the expensive drives. Seagate has
no plans to release SSD drives for consumers as the high prices could deter
them for the next few years, Watkins said in an interview.

The release date and price information for the 2T-byte hard drive were not
available. Seagate released 1T-byte hard drives, the Barracuda 7200.11 and Barracuda
ES.2, in the middle of 2007.

While there is no competition now between hard drives and SSDs, Seagate is thinking of going to SSDs in the long term to replace hard drives for top-tier enterprises.

"SSDs are not price-competitive yet," Watkins said. The storage market
is driven by cost-per-gigabyte and though SSDs provide benefits such as power
savings, they won't be in laptops in the next few years, Watkins said. Low-power
consumption capabilities and high speeds make SSDs useful for laptops, but the
cost-per-gigabyte won't come down at least for the next few years, Watkins said.

"If the cost-per-gigabyte comes down to 10 cents, maybe," Seagate
will focus on SSD storage for consumers, Watkins said.

A 128G-byte SSD costs US$460, or $3.58 per gigabyte, compared to $60 for a
160G-byte hard drive, said Krishna Chander, senior analyst at iSuppli.

"It will take three to four years for SSDs to come to parity with hard
drives," on price and reliability, Chander said.

Besides price, other issues will keep SSDs from the consumer space, Watkins
said.

Users seek fat storage to carry data and hard drives can store terabytes of
data, something SSDs can't do, Watkins said. SSDs also have write issues, with
cells in the drives deteriorating quickly and reducing storage capacity, a general
problem that plagues flash drives.

Even enterprise adoption of SSDs could be slow, Watkins said. "People
are still trying to get tape out of the enterprise," Watkins said.

Seagate's SSD would be mainly for data centers that rely on processing data
quickly, like indexing servers or search servers, that can temporarily store
data until it is ultimately moved to permanent storage on hard drives or tape.
Solid-state drives can move data up to 10 times quicker than hard drives, but
data has to ultimately be moved to larger and more reliable storage, Watkins
said.

The SSD drive could also be useful for data centers looking to save on energy
consumption and costs.

Seagate is taking a wait-and-see approach to SSDs, similar to the company's
approach to optical storage. Seagate acquired optical-storage company Quinta
in 1997 when everyone thought optical storage would replace hard drives, Watkins
said. Seagate wasn't sure how far rotating media technology would stretch, but
the cost-per-gigabyte fell and hard drives overtook optical drive technology.

Selling hard drives will remain Seagate's focus for now, but it will make sure
the SSD component is available to customers, Watkins said. The company is internally
researching and developing SSD storage.

The company already offers hybrid drives like the Momentus that combine NAND
flash storage with hard drives to reduce power consumption and improve boot
times.

Seagate has been making noise in the SSD market for a year now, but it has
been mostly vaporware, iSuppli analyst Chander said. Seagate needs to get a
leg up over its competition by getting into the game early and packaging SSDs
in volume.

"They haven't stretched out. They are losing an opportunity. The reality
is no matter what, in the next three to five years SSDs are going to come out,"
Chander said.

Entering the SSD market early could give Seagate an advantage over its major
competitor, Western Digital, which is too deeply lost in the hard drive market
to make its presence felt in the SSD market, Chander said.

IDG News Service

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