Bill Watkins Versus the Solid-State Drive

Seagate's stuck between a rock, a hard place, and a courtroom.

On one hand, the company faces strong competition from its peers. Western Digital now dominates the low-capacity, high-speed portion of the storage race and Samsung's still rocking the top of the high-performance, high-capacity charts with its speedy terabyte drive. On the other hand, you have the up-and-comers. Flash-memory manufacturers are looking to make a foothold with their high-performance products, one that's sure to increase as prices drop.

But if the volatile storage market has taught us anything, it's that the big companies and players are more like baseball teams than anything else: sometimes you win the Series, sometimes you don't make the playoffs, and sometimes you just get it handed to you for 162 games. Seagate's not at the bottom of the storage division by any means, but competitors are certainly starting to stake their claims in the marketplace. Seagate, notsomuch. At least, we haven't seen anything in their product line that makes us scream "industry-killer," save for the awesomely named D.A.V.E. device.

So what's Seagate been up to? Where are the new innovations that will make a storage menace out of this sleeping giant? And why is the company suing SSD manufacturers--perhaps a glimmer of Seagate's roadmap for the future? We recently sat down with Seagate's CEO, Bill Watkins, to get his take on these new developments (or lack thereof). And to figure out, for ourselves, how he plans to flex Seagate's storage muscle for the near-future.

Does the average person need a terabyte of storage? Where do you draw the line between high performance and high capacity?

I think the short answer is they need performance and they need storage. The thing about storage: No one really respects storage. They always respect microprocessors, they respect graphics, but nobody has any respect for storage. I’ll just give you a little anecdote–when Seagate was formed in 1980, one of the reasons a lot of people made a lot of money at Seagate was that there wasn’t a VC in the Valley willing to fund a storage company.

The first hard drive from Seagate was five megabytes–five megabytes of storage. A five-and-a-quarter-inch, big honkin’ drive doing five megabytes. No one–and there are some great letters we have–would invest in a drive company. The answer [we got] was that no one would ever need five megabytes of storage in their personal life. And that’s been the theme all along. As years have gone by, no one thought they’d need a gigabyte, no one thought they needed ten, or a hundred.

I used to tell [people] this story a long time ago: You have a hundred gigabytes in your home. And people would go “no way no way.” I’ll tell you right now, you have a terabyte of storage that you’re using in your home. You’ve got it in your mp3s, your iPods, you’ve got it on your TV set and your DVR, you’ve got it on your notebook, you’ve got it on your desktop, you’ve got it on your backup, you’ve got it on your GPS system – it’s all over. You don’t realize you have that much storage going on, you just don’t realize it. In a lot of ways, we’re kind of like the Wizard of Oz: We’re the man behind the curtain and no one recognizes how critical or how enabling this is. But this world, and going forward, it’s about content. It’s about electronic content distribution.

And the battle that’s really going on is not about microprocessors, speed, performance, or how much capacity. The battle going on is about people moving from physical distribution of content to electronic distribution of content. I don’t want a newspaper, I don’t want a CD, I don’t want a DVD, I don’t want a Blu-Ray disc. I want electronic media. I want to see my news on the internet. I want to move my music around and enjoy it, but I don’t want to have a CD. I just want to download it and do it.

But the battle going on, the war, it’s already over. It was never about Blu-Ray versus HD DVD, it was about physical distribution versus digital distribution. And what enables digital distribution of content is storage.

"In a lot of ways, we’re kind of like the Wizard of Oz: We’re the man behind the curtain and no one recognizes how critical or how enabling this is."

The simplest content to distribute is music. So you have an MP3 player in your hand. At the enterprise level, there’s a bunch of hard drives with all that music sitting there and it’s backed up. At your home, at your notebook or desktop, you’ve got to download it there, then you download it to your hand. Another big capacity is your desktop or your notebook – maybe you backed it up, maybe with an external drive. You may have an online account at Google or whatever. And then you finally get it to your hand. But the movement of that content creates five or six storage devices in order to enable the movement of that content – to hold it, to send it, and then to receive it. That’s our world. And no one respects it yet, but we’re going to get it out there.

So what’s more important to Seagate? Is it drive size or drive performance?

The most important thing to Seagate is enabling content distribution. The size is easy: I can give you performance, I can give you IOPS, I can give you speed, I can give you all of that. I can give you massive capacity, I don’t really care. What’s really more critical is that I want more and more content being digitized and I want that content moved digitally around the world.

So I want you to store it in the clouds, I want you to store it your hand, I want you to store it in your car, I want you to store it in your desktop, your notebook, I want you to back it up, I want you to send it to your grandmother. I want you to move content.

On the next page: Mobile storage and the search for the lost hybrid drive!

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Looking at the D.A.V.E. device, why would Seagate go for disk-based storage when flash has already permeated the market for handheld devices?

Again, the problem is you can’t live with 16 gigs at the enterprise—you can’t live with it in your notebook, your desktop. But it’s a great application for your home. You’re not going to store all your content there unless it’s just music. If it’s video, high-def, you’re not going to do it.

A great example is the MacBook Air. You have a choice—you want to buy a 64-gigabyte SSD and you pay an extra thousand. That’s your choice. You don’t get better warranty, you don’t get better performance. You just pay an extra thousand dollars for less capacity. That’s my argument against flash.

We’ll have flash storage, but flash is just a component. It’s like a head or a disk, it’s not a solution. It’s a component. You have to put an interface on it, you have to put error correction, you have to put firmware, you have to make it look like a hard drive. We’ll do all that.

Where did hybrid drives go?

The reason you don’t get a solid performance improvement is because Vista doesn’t work that well yet. We’re going to try to keep working it, but hybrids, to me, are a natural solution. We’ll see hybrids out in two or three years if we can double the performance improvement. But all it’ll do is make a hard drive look like a flash drive with a lot more capacity at a lower cost.

The quote I always hear from Seagate is that storage increases by 40 percent each year…

Sixty, now.

How do you jump the wall then? What technology will bring us up to a terabyte and a half? Two terabytes?

People are digitizing content at about a sixty-percent increase in petabytes a year now. So every year, we are digitizing and storing sixty percent more petabytes than we did the year before. This is a lot of storage. That drives a lot of demand. And that demand will be fulfilled by higher-capacity drives in certain markets, or it’ll just be more units.

Is it a question of better technology, or just increasing the size of the drive by using additional platters, for example?

One of the great things about the hard drive is that we can probably drive sixty percent capacity-per-disc increases for the next five or six years. We understand our role in that a whole lot better, and probably underpin a lot more than the solid state guys.

"We’ll see hybrids out in two or three years if we can double the performance improvement. But all it’ll do is make a hard drive look like a flash drive with a lot more capacity at a lower cost."

What’s Seagate focusing on now?

The thing about Seagate, we’re in every market where storage is played. For the enterprise market, it’s all about improving performance. It’s bringing SAS interface to it. We just announced our terabyte SAS drive, so we’re the first ones to come out with a SAS interface for terabyte to bring really high-capacity, low-cost computing to those people that need a high-performance, high-ops SAS interface.

If it’s in the notebook, it’s about having a 250 gigabyte and a 500 gigabyte notebook drive. If you’re in consumer, it’s about getting the highest capacity you can at the lowest cost. If you’re in the desktop, it’s everything from a low-cost 80-gigabyte or 160-gigabyte model for the business world to having 7,200rpm high performance for certain parts. It’s different tiers for different markets.

The great thing about Seagate is we play in every market and every application, so we’re able to take our technology and put it in products. If we take our leading technology and put it in enterprise, we deploy it one way. We put it in desktop, we deploy it another way. We put it into consumer for DVRs, consumers are about noise—how do you get power and noise? So again, each department has its own thing.

If you’re an Internet guy, like a Yahoo, or a Google, or an AOL, you want the highest capacity drive you can get your hands on with the lowest power consumption. You don’t care about IOPS. You really don’t, because you’re just storing stuff and duplicating, and replicating, whatever. If you’re Morgan Stanley or you’re an enterprise EMC guy, you’re really worried about IOPS – there’s a lot of transaction stuff happening. So again, each part of our market has different criteria. What we try to do is develop the leading technology—based on whether it’s power, areal density, security, IOPS, whatever—and deploy that into a product that can optimize that product for the specific market we want to go after

If I spend a lot of money on areal density for gaming. That don’t mean nothing. If I spend a lot of money for IOPS for gaming, it don’t mean nothing to them. But if they get enough capacity at the right cost structure, that means a lot to them.

Up next: Placing Seagate amongst its peers and litigating the SSD patent war.

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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.