As part of its quarterly earnings call, Seagate said that it has begun putting 1 Terabyte per platter hard drives into production.
CEO Steve Luczo said that mass production has been delayed and "lagged" behind Seagate's initial plans, but is now on track to be shipped in a volume of "millions" of units by the end of the current quarter. The transition to the mass market will enable the company to take the technology into the mainstream while preserving more profit margin.
While Luczo said that Seagate has not been directly affected by the flooding in Thailand, it conceded that some of its suppliers were affected and that the company will be able to ship between "40 million and 50 million drives" during the December quarter. In the most recent quarter, Seagate shipped a total of 50.8 million hard drives - 6.9 million into the enterprise market, 33.4 million client consumer drives and 10.5 million non-compute hard drives. 67 percent of Seagate drives were distributed via OEMs, 10 percent via retail and 23 percent via distributors.
Seagate's total revenue was slightly up year-over-year to $2.8 billion, but the recorded net profit was down to $140 million.
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Douglas Perry was a freelance writer for Tom's Hardware covering semiconductors, storage technology, quantum computing, and processor power delivery. He has authored several books and is currently an editor for The Oregonian/OregonLive.
