Seagate sets 5-year target for 2-billionth drive

SINGAPORE--Seagate aims to ship its two-billionth hard disk drive within the next five years, according to a company executive.

Teh Ban Seng, Seagate's vice president and managing director for sales and marketing in the Asia-Pacific region, said Wednesday at a media briefing that the hard disk drive maker took 29 years to reach the 1 billionth shipment milestone, but targets to ship the next billion in a fraction of that.

The company, said Teh, is looking beyond traditional hard drives to deliver that goal. Seagate is in the midst of introducing its second-generation hybrid drives, and will make announcements relating to solid state drives (SSDs) sometime this year.

Teh, who did not disclose to ZDNet Asia a more specific timeframe for the launch of Seagate's SSD strategy, noted however that SSDs represent only "incremental opportunities" to the overall consumption of hard drives.

Within the enterprise, the technology is best suited to power the boot drive in blade servers, where the emphasis is to read a lot of data quickly and less storage capacity is required, said Teh.

In notebook PCs, hybrid drives present better value even up till 2012 as the "supposed benefits of SSDs are not worth" the extra premium, Teh pointed out. Customers purchasing notebooks with SSDs today generally pay about US$500 extra for a capacity of about 32GB, and could pay US$75 more for 120GB in four years, he said.

According to Teh, the flash industry, which currently makes up less than 10 percent of the total storage available, will find it challenging to pump in significant investment over the next few years to drive prices down in order to increase adoption. Flash companies, he noted, have not made any major moves to date--an indication that the market is not as lucrative.

By 2012, annual shipments of hard drive shipments globally will reach over 700 million, with hybrid drives accounting for about 15 percent of the market, said Teh. SSDs will create an incremental opportunity of about 12 percent.

Reaching the next billionth shipment will not happen overnight; instead, Seagate expects to grow about 15 percent year-on-year, said Teh. About half of the company's global growth, he added, will come from emerging markets including China, Indonesia, India and the Philippines.