Hard Drives: Hardly Extinct

CHIBA, JAPAN -- Hard-disk drive technology is anything but dead and isn't in danger of being replaced by memory chips anytime soon, an executive of drive-maker Seagate Technologies says.

The comment, perhaps not surprising given that hard-disk drives are Seagate's bread-and-butter, were in response to a prediction made by the head of Samsung's chip division that flash memory is on course to replace other forms of data storage technology, especially in portable devices.

"When Samsung said hard disks are dead, I think they were being completely irresponsible, extremely short-sighted and simply weren't telling the truth," said Rob Pait, director of global consumer electronics marketing at Seagate, in an interview at the Ceatec Japan 2005 trade show here. "It may be that one day flash memory will be all that we need, but one day we will be able to take tourist trips to Mars."

The prediction of flash memory supremacy was made by Hwang Chang-Gyu, president of the Korean company's semiconductor division, last month as the company launched a 16-gigabit flash memory chip. Like Pait's comment, those from Hwang aren't totally surprising given that Samsung is one of the world's largest producers of flash memory chips, but they do point to a growing battle for the middle ground in the storage market, particularly in the portable electronics space.

Hard Drive Action

In the last few years the price of flash memory has been falling fast and making it more viable at increasingly large capacities. For example, when Apple launched its iPod Mini line in early 2004 it opted for a hard-disk drive, but a price drop of about 40 percent in flash prices meant the recently-released iPod nano line can use flash memory for the same storage capacity.

Seagate was one of a handful of companies that supplied 1-inch hard-disk drives to Apple for its music players and Pait said Apple's decision to kill the product line won't have a major affect on its 1-inch drive business.

"While we really value Apple's business, the point is that it just didn't make that big of a dent and we haven't changed our forecast for the 1-inch drive," he said. "The demand is huge for our Compact Flash drive."

Samsung is set to go straight for the PC hard-disk drive market soon with the planned launch of a 16GB solid-state disk drive based on flash chips. The drives will have parallel ATA interfaces, just like hard-disk drives, and come in cases that match 2.5-inch or 1.8-inch drives so they can be used as direct replacements.

Pait said that if Samsung was sure the hard-disk drive business was dead, then the two companies should talk.

"We thought Samsung was just being weird," he said of Hwang's comments. "If Samsung wants to come to us with their dead hard-disk division, we'll be more than happy to take it off their hands."