I was yesterday at Seagate's CEO, Bill Watkins, gorgeous beach "mansion" in Aptos, for the company's second "Annual Media Dinner". As usual the who's who of the media tech/business world showed up including the WSJ, the Financial Times, TheStreet.com, the LA Times or Nikkei Electronics. The meal arranged by executive Chef Victor Scargle, of Go Fish restaurant in St Helena, was succulent although I'm not sure everybody found the "rare" Kobe beef cooked enough to their taste. Personally, I could have eaten it raw! The wine pairing was... well typical Californian wines (too heavy for me!) but I did really enjoy the Greenwood Ridge's late harvest white Riesling (2006) that I actually brought home instead of the Cabernet Sauvignon parting gift :-)

Anyway, more on Bill's house later. About half-way through the meal, Seagate CEO was passing the company's upcoming solid state or Flash drive (pictured), expected to ship next year. I was told that it worked but had not tested it myself. While Watkins stayed mum on the drive's capacity (and believe me that was really tough for him!), the CEO acknowledge that Seagate will partner or do a joint-venture with Flash manufacturers like Sandisk, Toshiba or Micron, on a future manufacturing fab to ensure availability of cheap Flash components.

"Building a new fab costs billions of dollars and those guys are looking for partners with cash. And we have the cash!", said Watkins.

Inspite the upcoming Flash drive in Seagate's product line up, Watkins dismissed the market opportunity for such drives and was more adamant of "hybrid" drives which include both Flash memory and a magnetic drive like Seagate's Momentus 5400 PSD.

"If Flash drives are really the future, then why is Samsung [#1 in Flash] spending/loosing so much money in making/selling magnetic drives", ponders Bill Watkins.

According to Watkins, adding a 1GB Flash memory will increase the cost of a magnetic drive by only about $10-15, while providing the benefits (speed, 50% better reliability and more energy efficient) of a costly and low capacity "pure" Flash drive. And some "whispers" that Dell was only selling under a hundred of those Flash drives per week. Compare this, to thousands of laptops Dell is selling a day and the 100Ks hybrid drives Seagate already sold. Again the hype doesn't always translate in actual dollars!

Moreover, Watkins was really insisting this time in "hyping" Seagate's patents portfolio, pointing out that the Flash makers will have, in a way or another, license/violate Seagate's technology to make their SSDs work better in a hard drive environment/application.

"Those Flash drives do not work very well [...] When we looked at Sandisk's solid state drive (SSD), their controller technology is like what we had 20 years ago. Since then we wrote over a million of lines of code to do error-correction, SAS/SATA protocols and interfaces, etc...", added Seagate CEO.

And about Intel's latest announcement on making/selling SSDs:

I don't think Intel is going to make it. They are going to want to put it on the motherboard and it ain't going to work. It's the same problem they had with the graphics chip when Nvidia beat the crap out of them. They keep trying to protect their microprocessor business by trying to add more things. I don't think it's going to work.