Newsmaker: Seagate's mission--'digitizing your lifestyle'

By Charles Cooper
Staff Writer, CNET News.com Published: May 8, 2006 4:00 AM PDT See all Newsmakers

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How much longer will you be able to keep the technology edge over the competition, with the perpendicular hard-drive business obviously changing pretty quickly?
Watkins: We wake up every day very paranoid. We think we have a nice lead now--six months maybe. There's nothing that says people can't do what we're doing if they're willing to put the investment, the time, the energy in there. What's important is how we've done it; even if they catch us, we think that we can bring that technology to market a lot more cost effectively than anybody else.

Is there a hard-drive analogy to Moore's Law? Are there limitations that are going to change the way you think about hard-drive technology limits?
Watkins: We have a technology road map out about seven years right now. We see issues, but I think we see a lot of ways to get around it.

What are some of the issues?
Watkins: Well, you think why we had to go perpendicular (technology). If you think about it, within a disk on the media it's just a bunch of little magnetic particles, north and south poles...As you pack more capacity on a disk you've got to put more particles. And if you put more particles on there, the particles get closer and when they get too close, they want to repel, just like, you know, two magnets want to repel. That's a natural physical magnetism, and so when you're longitudinal, when you get so close they start repelling, you can't hold them...So, the next technique will be how do we get them very close together so that they don't repel each other.

What time frame are you talking about here?
Watkins: We're committed at Seagate to increase the areal density per disk 40 percent a year. I'm sure there's going to be a limit and we have to figure it out, but we'll try a little more in opticals and stuff like that.

The hard-drive business is turning 50. As you look back, what's the biggest surprise you've seen in the way hard-drive technology has developed over the course of these last decades?
Watkins: Reliability. I mean, it's amazed me, as we have packed a lot more sophistication and a lot more technology and a lot more capacity in these things, how much the reliability and quality has improved over this time.