Is Seagate the jack-of-all trades hard drive manufacturer? Western Digital dominates the low-capacity, high-performance end of the market…

It’s a cost deal. We don’t sell to that market, and we could because we have 10,000rpm, 15,000rpm drives. But all of ours are much higher performance and they’re aimed at the enterprise market. We haven’t put a 10K in that market. We just don’t think there’s a big enough market. It’s not that we can’t put them out there, it just doesn’t make a lot of sense to do that.

When does Seagate plan to enter the SSD or flash market?

We’ll have products in all fields. We don’t think notebook makes a lot of sense yet. We don’t think desktop makes a lot of sense. We think enterprise probably has a pretty good opportunity. It’ll be three or four years out, but we think that enterprise, with tiered storage, makes sense. There’s a tiered storage architecture in enterprise that’s all about power savings and performance. They need very little capacity, and they can pay a lot of money for that.

We’re indifferent to it. If it’s an optical, we’ll use optical devices, we don’t care. It’s about putting together a solution that meets the customer needs. I use a head, I need a disk. So if I have to have an optical device, I’ll use that. If it’s a solid-state device, I’ll use that.

Why is Seagate flexing its patents against SSDs?

They can’t steal from me. If they want to do new technology, great, then go do new technology. But don’t sit there and steal all my technology and then think you’re doing something. What’s great about STEC—they didn’t deny they were stealing. They’re trying to say [the patents] are not valid. That’s what they argue: They’re not valid. If they weren’t valid, why did [the Patent and Trademark Office] grant them to me?

Do you plan to go after the smaller niche manufacturers of SSDs, or will you turn your sights to larger players like Intel?

They can’t violate my specs. If they want to put something into notebooks, desktops, or enterprise— if they don’t violate my patents—that’s great. That’s new technology. But coming in with a component, a chip, and saying I need your firmware, I need your code, I need your error correction, I need all this stuff from Seagate in order to sell it? You don’t get to do that for free.

Who will win the race then? Will Seagate build a drive that’s bigger and faster, or will the SSD guys finally catch up and make their version of a really big drive?

If solid state gets a cost-for-performance, Seagate will have a version. Again, it’s a chip. It’s not a solution. You have to create a solution. A hard drive is not the head and the disk, those are components. A hard drive is all what happens once you record those bits on the head and disk. How do you handle that data? How do you interact with the Microsoft operating system? How do you error correct? How do you data recover? How do you do interface? How do you connect to the PC, the notebook, to anybody?

All that stuff – we developed that technology. You don’t get to come in and steal it from me. You don’t. What amazes me—drive guys all cross-license. The solid-state guys seems to want to argue everything in court, which is fine.