Seagate to Continue Focus on Hybrid HDDs

The hard drive industry is returning to a state of normal as far as hard drive availability is concerned, but is now facing macroeconomic headwinds. Seagate company sold about 66 million hard drives - a 42 percent market share - in the most recent quarter (fiscal Q4, calendar Q2). Revenue was $4.5 billion and profit was $1 billion. While the industry has recovered from the disastrous Thailand flood last year, Seagate now says that it expects sales of only $4 billion this quarter - a statement that sent Seagate's stock down 8 percent during trading today. The company added that average selling prices for HDDs will remain nearly stable this quarter as a decline of less than 5 percent is expected.

On the product side, Seagate said it was pleased with the demand it saw from the enterprise cloud segment as well as strong notebook drive sales that were up 12 percent over the first calendar quarter. Seagate is still following a strategy that favors hybrid hard drives over SSDs. CEO Stephen Luczo said that the company will be launching the firm's third-gen client hybrid drives, this time in a 7 mm form factor, later this year.

However, the executive also noted that Gary Gentry "will be rejoining Seagate as senior vice president and general manager of [Seagate's] SSD business." Gentry was general manager of Micron's enterprise SSD business. He also stated that "in addition to the enterprise SSD products [Seagate is] shipping today, [the] technology partnership with Samsung has progressed on plan and has resulted in a highly competitive Tier 0 product." The company expects to ship test units of this product "at the end of this quarter."

There was no information on Seagate's rumored interest in buying a consumer SSD company such as OCZ.

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  • monkeymonk
    Harddrive prices are back to normal? ...News to me
    Reply
  • Pinhedd
    The Momentus XT hard drives are amazing. I'm looking forward to what they come out with next
    Reply
  • whimseh
    I have a 500GB Momentus XT, I love it!
    Reply
  • memadmax
    .... wah wah wah wah waaaaaaaahhh...

    See: "High HDD prices result in record sales at Seagate"......
    Reply
  • oneblackened
    My laptop has a 750GB Momentus XT, and it is FAST.
    Reply
  • JeTJL
    Seagate seems to be the only company doing this for consumers, seriously would like some other companies to jump on board to drive the prices down for these too.
    Reply
  • danwat1234
    That 7mm thick Momentus XT, that will probably be a 500GB hard drive, obviously with 1 platter.
    Can't wait for the 1TB version with hopefully a NAND flash cache that can buffer writes.
    Reply
  • tomfreak
    mean while I will not be buying HDD until 1Tb hit pre flood levels.
    Reply
  • rb420
    The hard drive industry is returning to a state of normal as far as hard drive availability is concerned

    Slowly trickling down to retailers...

    Local Pre Flood Price: hitachi 2tb 69.99 Now: Seagate 2tb Green 89.99

    It isn't quite what it was, but it is getting there. Both drives were OEM.



    Reply
  • game junky
    I have tried the 500 GB Seagate hybrid drives but not the more recent 750GB model that doubled the flash partition to 16GB. I have heard encouraging things and I think for a single drive solution that requires large capacity with quick than normal SATA access times, it is a winner. Have a catalog designer in the office using one in her laptop she uses for CS5 and she is happy with the performance versus a standard drive. As they continue to increase the density of flash memory, I think we will see higher capacity drives at decreasing prices, but I think that's 2-3 years down the road for the next really significant change. There are some sub $/GB options out there (including the Samsung 830 if you get lucky on some popular sites) so we are in the right direction to make drive manufacturers compete at those price points. As a consumer with a lot of data, I think it's great.

    Keep going Seagate, increase the flash partition to 32GB and lets see how fast we can make these things fly!
    Reply