1 Billion Seagate hard drives, the next will take 5 years

by Alex Zaharov-Reutt

Wednesday, 23 April 2008

Page 2 of 3 Of course, hard drives aren’t the only storage technology around today. Tapes – and even floppy disks – are still on sale. But flash technology has moved forward in leaps and bounds. Although 64GB SSD (solid state) drives have started appearing in devices such as the Apple MacBook Air and the Lenovo Thinkpad X300, they’re still mightily expensive – far more so than hard drives, which for the same money deliver terabytes of storage to the mere gigabytes SSD’s offer today. While USB flash drives and SD memory cards, from SanDisk and others, are now available in sizes of 8GB for less than $100, office supply stores in Australia sell 320GB hard drives for little more, although they are much larger. And while some phones over the past couple of years have had miniature, 1-inch hard drives installed, the latest iPhones come with 16GB of flash storage, Nokia’s upcoming N96 promises 16GB too, the newest iPod Touch has 32GB, while 64GB and 128GB capacities are certain to become commonplace in portable devices by 2010, if not sooner. There’s even holographic storage – once the domain of science fiction – has become real, with the inPhase holographic disc, the size of a DVD, now able to hold 300GB of data – although the drive itself is still very expensive at US $18,000. But flash is the hard drive’s biggest worry. IBM’s recent Racetrack memory discoveries promise to push flash into the storage stratosphere.  Seagate knows it, of course, having just decided to sue a flash drive manufacturer for patent infringements, and who knows, Seagate probably has a few flash developments of its own up its sleeve. Still, hard disks rule the roost, and the top of the hard disk hierarchy is Seagate. Amazing advances are still promised – Seagate says it should have a 37.5 terabyte hard drive out in 2010 – just over two and a half years from today. Bill Watkins, Seagate CEO’s, took the time in Seagate’s press release to celebrate Seagate’s success, saying: “This company has an amazing, colorful and important history, which continues to be written every day by our 55,000 employees around the world.” Watkins continued: “Al Shugart and a few others started the company behind a convenience store in 1979 and enabled the birth of the first PCs. Today we’re at the centre of the digital content revolution. So reaching this milestone is a great opportunity for us to reflect on our accomplishments and those of our predecessors, and to also look forward to the great things we can still achieve as a company.” Please read onto page 3. << First page <   1 2 3 Next page > Last page - Post your comment >>

 

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