Seagate Responds to Apple's SSD Challenge

By: Mark Hachman
10.21.2010
7 comments

Apple's new MacBook Air, and its used of a solid-state disc drive, won't have a measurable impact on hard-drive vendor Seagate, the company's chief executive said this week.

At its "Back to the Mac" event, Apple chief executive Steve Jobs called the new MacBook Airs the "future of the notebook," without elaboration. Inside each is a solid-state disc (SSD), a flash memory-based disk drive that competes directly with the rotating disk drives that Seagate manufactures.

During the conference call marking Seagate's first quarter of fiscal 2011, Seagate chief executive Steve Luczo was asked about Jobs' statement, and about Apple's decision to include an SSD in the new MacBook Air. Is the SSD the future of notebook storage, Ben Reitzes of Barclays Capital asked.

"I would say though that from what we know of the offering... the percentage of their units that they sell with SSDs versus HDDs is a tiny fraction," Luczo said, according to a transcript provided by Seeking Alpha. "I think it's under 3 percent, certainly under 5 percent. Obviously this isn't the first product that they've had. I have and Air book with an SSD unit that I've had for I guess a year and half now. And I think, there are certain things that are certainly very nice about it. And other things that are little bit frustrating and a little bit frustrating parts are thecost and the lack of capacity."

In May, Seagate launched the Momentus XT, a revamped hybrid of a traditional hard drive and flash disk, which Luczo said contained the positive aspects of both technologies.

"I think the answer is yes but I think as Seagate introduced hybrid drive last quarter, you get basically the features and function of SSD at more like disc drive cost and capacity," Luczo said. "And in fact with the additional layer of caching we believe that, downstream from a product perspective there will be performance advantages to SSD whether or not that has to do with instant on or application load or what a load looks like year or two after you."

"I can tell you that my SSD drive takes about 25, 30 seconds to boot now versus the 12 seconds when I bought it," Luczo said. "And that's just an issue more related to OS than it is specifically to the technology but again with the hybrid there is things that you can do it alleviate that so your boot times are actually as compelling one and two, three and four years down the road."

But will SSDs replace traditional hard drives? Not surprisingly, Luczo said they would not.

"So I think that's where mainstream notebook computing is going if that's what your question is no I don't, do I think that Apple will be successor with that product absolutely, because Apple is successful with all their products," Luczo added. "And so it's a very compelling company and a compelling value proposition within their value chain. But again we just view it as more devices that are computing in eating data and if they're low capacity on the edge that means they need a lot of storage pipe and down close to the edge and whether not that's in a mash box or code in the cloud or in a local cloud. Those are all markets that we serve. So the more that people do creative things with computers and devices were all four and Steve certainly is at the forefront of that."