Seagate Redesigns Drives

Company plans smaller disk drives with 73GB to 300GB capacities.

Chris Mellor, Techworld.com
Wednesday, May 19, 2004
Seagate Technology is preparing a major revamp of its disk drives, and
is expected to introduce smaller physical and larger capacity drives
in keeping with the rest of the market.

The company will make the announcement in mid-June. It will affect the
entire range of drives and reflect increased areal density, gaining
75GB/platter. Brian Dexheimer, Seagate's executive VP for sales and
marketing, says, "We will be making announcements in the next 30 days
around the entire range: 3.5 inch to sub-2.5-inch." At the 10,000-rpm
enterprise drive level, expect 73GB to 300GB capacity levels, using
the existing 4-platter design.

This brings Seagate up to the same level as announcements from
Fujitsu, Hitachi, and Maxtor.

There has been interest in whether such large drives are needed. But
Seagate's entry would appear to support the view that they are,
particularly for nearline storage.



More Announcements
The company will also announce new 7200-rpm drives. Dexheimer says to
expect 120GB and 300GB+ capacity points. Capacity can be higher if
rotation speed is less than 10,000 rpm--so possibly a 320GB drive with
an areal density level providing 85GB per platter.

Dexheimer confirmed that Seagate will enter the sub-notebook area
where the current form factors are 1.8 inch, 1.0 inch, and 0.85 inch.

CEO Bill Watkins says that Seagate was "at end of a two year cycle of
products," and the announcements will set the scene for the next
couple of years. Current drive technology is reaching its limits.
Watkins expects perpendicular recording to initially appear in two
years' time and provide up to 500 gigabits per square inch. In four or
five years' time, heat-assisted magnetic recording will possibly be
introduced and take us to 1 terabit per square inch.

Seagate recently announced poor results and Watkins ascribed part of
this at least to Hitachi GST's success in notebook drives. He
explains: "Notebook has grown really fast and Hitachi GST has really
taken advantage of that. Hitachi GST has come out of the IBM disk
operation merger very well. It's a credible competitor. They've done
the merger better than I thought they would. My personal feeling is
they got lucky on the notebooks."



Market Leader?
Dexheimer made clear that Seagate regards itself as leading the
serialized interface space. He says, "We've actually shipped more SATA
drives than anyone else in the industry. We are (also) the leader far
and away with SAS. We think we're going to be the first to market with
SAS. We feel like we're very well positioned in serial architectures."

Seagate is increasing its manufacturing capacity. It is building a
second plant in Singapore, for media manufacturing with a $150 million
investment. It is also planning to expand capacity in Thailand to
build drives. The new plant will be ready sometime in the next 12
months.

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/...051904X,00.asp


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