Hybrid Hard Drives?

Seagate CEO Bill Watkins came through DC recently, and we sat down for coffee and a chat about the disk drive business. Seagate has about 35% of the market. A few of the most interesting points:

* He believes the next generation of personal storage will be drives that are hybrids of hard disk drives (like the ones now in your PC) and solid state flash drives (like those little thumb drives, or the storage in an iPod Nano). Flash drives are faster and use less power. Hard drives can store way more data for a cheaper price. So the flash drive can sit between the computer and the hard drive, temporarily storing data, shuffling big chunks to the hard drive, and saving power.

"Hybrids exist today, but there's no reason to buy one yet," Watkins says. "Vista isn't ready for them."

* Like just about everybody, it seems, Seagate wants to become more than a technology -- it wants to be "a platform." Watkins says he's looking for ways to add processing power to hard drives so they can do encryption separate from the computer's operating system. I'm sure some of you understand why that would be significant, but I don't.

* "We understand our technical road map for the next five years," Watkins says. Hard drive price/performance will increase 40% to 100% a year -- "and we're not violating any laws of physics, God or nature." Today, a computer maker can get a Seagate 160 MB drive for about $38. In five years, "you'll be able to get a 1 terabyte drive for that price," he says.

Watkins has 6 terabytes of storage in his home, storing movies, photos, family videos. To put that in perspective, in 2002 United Airlines announced it was building a 6 terabyte "data warehouse" to store all its flight and customer information.