From the CEO at CES -
•*The killer number: revenue for the hard disk drive industry this year will be $35 billion. A single flash megafab costs $35 billion dollars. To replace all that storage capacity, though, you’d need to build 35 such megafabs. Spinning disk drives aren’t about to go away.
•*How Seagate will ride the flash boom: While flash disk drives like the ones in the MacBook Air aren’t about to do away with spinning disk drives, those spinning disk drives are getting equipped with enough flash storage to keep media moving. Right now Seagate’s hybrid drives are ? as fast as a flash drive, selll for less than 1/10th the cost, and have five times the capacity. Soon Luczo says, hybrid drives will be able to outperform flash drives. “My view is that in five years — if the Silicon guys can stay on the cost curve — 80% of our drives will be hybrid drives.
•*Streaming video is great, but all that content has to be stored somewhere — especially with consumers snapping up bigger, higher-definition displays: “Because they’ve got such expensive pieces fo glass they’re going to want to stream very rich content, to do that you’re going to need cashing, some in the devices, some in the cloud.” |
