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Terabyte Backup

The Maximum PC Staff — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:30:57 -0500

How do I, at a reasonable cost, back up all of my data? Long ago, when hard drives were 40GB, 4.7GB DVDs were a reasonable means of backup. But now with multi-terabyte hard drives there doesn’t seem to be any reasonable backup method. Right now I’m using RAID 5 rather than backing up my data. I have a RAID with five 1TB drives in it and I’m relying on the redundancy as the backup. I looked into tape backup drives and found that the cheapest 800GB LTO-4 drive was $1,800 and the tapes run $50 each. As it turns out, I could build another system, put together a duplicate array and back up one to the other for less than the cost of the tape drive. Is there any such thing as affordable backup anymore? I can’t find anything. Blu-ray isn’t even affordable yet, and it’s already too small for backups.

—K. Bateman

Ah, you’ve touched upon a common topic of discussion here at Maximum PC: How do you back up huge amounts of data effectively?

The bad news is, with the amounts of data you’re talking about, there’s no such thing as a cheap backup solution. If you want to back up 3TB of data, you’re going to have to spend some money. Sticking with what you have now may be tempting, but RAID 5 is not a backup strategy, and you’d have to buy at least one 1TB drive to rebuild your array if it fails, anyway. So here’s what the Doc recommends: Buy a multibay NAS (or external eSATA enclosure, such as WD’s MyBook Studio Edition II), fill it with 2TB drives and back up your array to it, or (if you have less than 3TB of data on your array) split your array up and use half for your primary drive and the other half for backup.

Western Digital's MyBook Studio II contains two 2TB drives and has an eSATA port. Not a bad choice for backing up huge amounts of data.

SUBMIT YOUR QUESTION Are flames shooting out of the back of your rig? First, grab a fire extinguisher and douse the flames. Once the pyrotechnic display has fizzled, email the doctor at doctor@maximumpc.com for advice on how to solve your technological woes.

Rambus Shows Off Hardware From ItsTerabyte Bandwidth Initiative

Paul Lilly — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 11:12:02 -0500

Rambus, the company most known for its rampage of patent lawsuits on all things memory, may soon be better known for something else. The company announced a Terabyte Bandwidth Initiative last year, in which it set a goal of developing a future memory architecture capable of delivering a terabyte per second of memory bandwidth to a single System-on-Chip (SoC), and Rambus showed at IDF that it's getting ever closer to that goal.

On display was a DRAM emulator pushing 16Gbps, a key hurdle in making a terabyte of bandwidth possible. However, the test chips were only single channel, putting a slight damper on the display. Still, if Rambus can bring to fruition its new memory architecture, which it looks to be well on its way to doing, it could usher in a new era of high performance memory products.

Image Credit: Rambus

IBM Introduces Industry's Fastest One Terabyte Tape Drive

Paul Lilly — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 22:58:01 -0500

Sun can lay claim as the first company to release a one terabyte tape drive with its StorageTek T10000B, but the company didn't have long to celebrate. Raining on their parade, IBM has released a one terabyte tape drive of its own, only this one runs 33 percent faster than Sun's.

The new IBM TS1130 tape drive can store up to one terabyte of uncompressed data per cartridge at 160MB/sec, or 40MB/sec faster than the T10000B, allowing the new model to complete backups up to 54 percent faster than the previous generation drive.

IBM describes the tape drives as being able to hold the text of one million books, and to keep that data from becoming corrupt, the TS1130 uses a special head overcoat technology IBM claims will lengthen the overall life expectancy of the drive. The TS1130 also utilizes a "Giant Magnetoresistive (GMR) head design that leverages IBM's world-record achievement of developing a more sensitive read-write head for the magnetic tape system." In other words, expect fewer data read errors.

The new drive uses existing 3592 rewritable and WORM (Write Once Read Many) cartridges, offering backwards compatibility with Gen 1, 2, and 3 formats supporting both read and write for Gen 2 and read only for Gen 1. And backwards compatibility is a good thing too, as IBM says the TS1130 will carry a starting price of $39,050, with an upgrade option from existing drives for a more manageable $19,500. Ouch.

Image Credit: IBM

Seagate Launches Industry-First 1.5TB Desktop Drive, Destroys Storage Worldstone

David Murphy — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 12:34:22 -0500

Put a feather in Seagate's cap. The storage titan has sprinted to the finish line and dredge up an exclusive: the world's first 1.5-terabyte hard drive. The 7,200-RPM drive uses a mere four platters to achieve its huge capacity point -- that's 375GB per platter of areal density. Beefy.

Seagate is claming a sustained data rate of 120 MB/s for its drive, which might very well be enough to place this little guy above Samsung's 333GB-per-platter HD103UJ drive. Other than that, the bulging Barracuda seems similar to every other high-capacity drive on the market: expect a 3 Gb/s SATA interface, an typical 32MB of cache, and a 7,200 RPM. The Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB drive will hit store shelves in August. Check out the full release below:

SEAGATE POWERS NEXT GENERATION OF COMPUTING WITH THREE NEW HARD DRIVES, INCLUDING WORLD’S FIRST 1.5-TERABYTE DESKTOP PC AND HALF-TERABYTE NOTEBOOK PC HARD DRIVES

SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif. — July 10, 2008 — Seagate (NYSE:STX) today unveiled the industry’s first 1.5-terabyte desktop and half-terabyte notebook hard drives to meet explosive worldwide demand for digital-content storage in home and business environments.

The debut of the Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB, the eleventh generation of Seagate’s flagship drive for desktop PCs, marks the single largest capacity hard drive jump in the more than half-century history of hard drives – a half-terabyte increase from the previous highest capacity of 1TB, thanks to the capacity-boosting power of perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology.

The Barracuda 7200.11 hard drive combines proven PMR technology, components and expert manufacturing to provide 1.5TB of reliable storage for mainstream desktop computers, workstations, desktop RAID, gaming and high-end PCs, and USB/FireWire/eSATA external storage.

Seagate’s new 2.5-inch half-terabyte 5400- and 7200-rpm drives – Momentus 5400.6 and Momentus 7200.4 – deliver the best combination of capacity, mobility and durability for mainstream and high-performance notebook computers, external storage solutions, PCs and industrial applications requiring small form factor.

Highlighting the global growth of digital content, Seagate expects to ship its two billionth hard drive within the next five years. Earlier this year Seagate shipped its one billionth hard drive since the company’s inception nearly 30 years ago.

“Organizations and consumers of all kinds worldwide continue to create, share and consume digital content at levels never before seen, giving rise to new markets, new applications and demand for desktop and
notebook computers with unprecedented storage capacity, performance and reliability,” said Michael Wingert, Seagate executive vice president and general manager, Personal Compute Business. “Seagate is committed to powering the next generation of computing today with the planet’s fastest, highest-capacity and most reliable storage solutions.”

Momentus 5400.6 and Momentus 7200.4 hard drives are the fourth generation of Seagate’s laptop family to use PMR. The Momentus 5400.6, a 5400-rpm drive, combines a powerful Serial ATA 3Gb/second interface and capacities ranging from 120GB to 500GB with an 8MB cache.

The Momentus 7200.4 hard drive, with its 7200-rpm spin speed and a Serial ATA 3GB/second interface, delivers true desktop performance. The power-efficient 7200-rpm drive maximizes battery life and comes in capacities ranging from 250GB to 500GB with a 16MB cache.

Both Momentus drives are built tough enough to withstand up to 1,000 Gs of non-operating shock and 350 Gs of operating shock to protect drive data, making the drives ideal for systems that are subject to rough handling or high levels of vibration. For added robustness in mobile environments, the Momentus 5400.6 and 7200.4 are offered with G-Force Protection, a free-fall sensor technology that helps prevent drive damage and data loss upon impact if a laptop PC is dropped. The sensor works by detecting any changes in acceleration equal to the force of gravity and parks the heads off the disc to prevent contact with the platter in a free fall of as little as 8 inches and within 3/10ths of a second.

Seagate’s new Momentus drives are lean on power consumption, allowing notebook users to work longer between battery charges, and are virtually inaudible thanks to Seagate’s innovative SoftSonic fluid-dynamic bearing motors and QuietStep ramp load technology.

The Barracuda 7200.11 hard drive combines the capacity and speed required for today’s most demanding desktop PC applications. The drive packs 1.5TB on just four platters and its fast Serial ATA 3Gb/second interface delivers an industry-leading sustained data rate of up to 120MB/second for fast boot, application startup and file access. The 3.5-inch drive is also offered in capacities of 1TB, 750GB, 640GB, 500GB, 320GB and 160GB with cache options of 32MB and 16MB.

All Momentus and Barracuda drives are backed by Seagate’s leading five-year warranty. You can find photos of these three new drives, and other Seagate products, at: http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/about/news_room/photos/

Availability
Shipments of the Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB are set to begin August 2008. Momentus 5400.6 and 7200.4 hard drives are to begin shipping in Q4 calendar 2008.

The "Tera Era" Begins Today: Hitachi Launches Three-Platter Terabyte Drive

David Murphy — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 02:01:01 -0500

Calling it the "Dawn of the Tera Era," Hitachi has announced its first three-platter terabyte drive. Billed as the Deskstar 7K1000.B, this is the second terabyte-class drive the company has produced since the launch of its first-to-the-market five-platter drive last year. But here's the weird part: the company has announced no concrete plans to phase out its second-generation drives before 2009. Nor is Hitachi coming in at a lower price point -- or comparable feature-set -- when compared to the other terabyte drives on the market today.

According to Larry Swezey, Hitachi's Director of HDD Marketing and Strategy, the five-platter drive will still curry favor in the enterprise market due to its magical blend of price and reliability. He sees most of Hitachi's consumer base switching over to one of the two versions of the new 7K1000.B drive. The first, which carries the simple 7K1000.B designation, is a 7,200 RPM model that will come with a 16MB cache buffer. Hitachi is looking to push the second model to its enterprise customers. Dubbed the E7K1000, this "souped-up" version of the drive (as Swezey bills it) will support a full 32MB cache, a five-year-warranty, and incorporate Rotational Vibration Safeguard technology to help protect against data loss in higher-movement environments.

Encryption

Both versions of the drive run on an expected 3Gb/s SATA interface. And both will feature optional hardware-based disk encryption technology. It works like this: you set either a user password or a master password for the hard drive in your system BIOS. You also pick a security level of either high or maximum. If someone jacks your hard drive, your data is protected as long as they can't guess the passwords. And if you lose the password, here's what happens:

Lose User Password, High Security: unlock your drive with the master password, all data restored.
Lose User Password, Maximum Security: unlock your drive with the master password, data gone.
Lose User password and Master Password: doorstop. Purchase new hard drive (or memory-retention course at local university).

Power Savings

In a nod to Western Digital's Caviar Green series of drives, Hitachi is incorporating energy-saving functionality into its 7K1000.B line. Swezey admitted that it's a move geared towards enterprise customers, as energy-savings is low on the priority list (if on it at all) for typical drive consumers. The 7K1000.B drives will use an unload idle mode to reduce total power consumption to 4.4 watts--right in line with the four-watt idle mode for Western Digital's 5,400 RPM Caviar Green drive. The drive's second power-savings mode, "low RPM idle," parks the drive heads and slows the platters below 5,400 RPM. This nearly halves the power consumption to 2.2 watts.

Performance

That's all well and good, but what about the drive's performance? We'll get our hands on the drive in about a month for an official round of benchmark tests. Don't expect wonders from Hitachi, however. According to Swezey, Hitachi looks to position this drive right in the center of the terabyte war. It won't set speed records, but it'll at least be competitive against all four other terabyte drives currently on the market (counting Hitachi's own five-platter drive, of course). This is certainly an interesting strategy, to say the least. We'll be curious to see how Hitachi's halving of its buffer plays out, performance-wise. But price-wise, the $240-MSRP drive ($280 for the E7K1000) seems a little steep given the predominance of speedy, 32MB-cache, sub-$200 drives on the market today.

Check out our full selection of terabyte drive reviews below:

Samsung HD103UJ

Seagate Barracuda 7200.11

Western Digital Caviar GP

Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000

Western Digital Caviar Black

Hitachi to Harvest 5TB Hard Drive by 2010

Paul Lilly — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 09:49:21 -0500

While SSDs continue to come down in price and up in performance, hard disk drives keep ballooning in size. And just when we thought we were becoming spoiled with storage space, Hitachi hits us with a humdinger by announcing plans to release a 5TB hard drive by 2010. That's FIVE freaking terabytes in a single 3.5" drive, or half the storage capacity of the human brain, claims Dr. Yoshihiro Shiroishi from Hitachi. In more concrete terms, 5TB equates to about 5,000 hours of video, or more than a million songs. Throw two drives together and you could store a human brain's worth of porn!

Hitachi's pledge trumps an earlier prediction the company made back in October 2007 when it said 4TB of storage would be likely by 2011. Instead, Hitachi will employ Current-Perpendicular-to-Plant Giant Magnetoresistance (CPP-GMR) magnetic read heads to pack an additional terabyte than initially anticipated, and a year sooner than predicted. CPP-GMR will make it possible to achieve data densities of 1TB or more per square inch, paving the way for even larger hard drives.

Home theater buffs will undoubtedly herald Hitachi's announcement, but what about everyone else? Are we reaching the point of diminishing returns in terms of hard drive space? Post your thoughts in the comments section.

Image Credit: Hitachi

A Spoonful of Caviar

David Murphy — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 13:22:04 -0500

Western Digital is rebranding its Caviar line of drives -- or maybe "recolorizing" is the proper word. Starting today, all of the company's Caviar-series hard drives will begin to fall under one of three colors: blue for "professional" drives of no particular importance, black for upper-level "niche" drives that push for high performance, and green for energy-saving-themed drives.

Leading the charge to this new color palate is Western Digital's newest creation, the 1TB Caviar Black. Coming in sizes of 750GB and 1TB, the three-platter drive now gives Samsung a competitor on the upper echelon of storage. Previously, Samsung's Spinpoint HD103UJ was the only consumer-grade hard drive to offer 1 terabyte of storage using only three platters. As a result of the increased areal density, the drive enjoyed an unmatched run to the top of our benchmark charts.

The Caviar Black looks to retake this performance foothold while still offering a number of proprietary Western Digital features designed to promote data retention. As any amount of vibration has the potential to promote data loss, Western Digital is securing its drive motors on both the top and bottom of the platters to reduce the effects of mild jittering on the drive. Similarly, the drive heads never touch the platters when parking. According to Western Digital, this should improve the Caviar Black's overall reliability.

The drive's other specs are what we'd expect from any drive of its class: a 3Gb/s SATA interface, a 32MB cache, and a 7,200 RPM rotation speed. Expect the drives to come in at an MSRP of $200 for the 750GB model and $250 for the terabyte version.

We'll have a review for this drive later today -- be on the lookout!

Bill Watkins Versus the Solid-State Drive

David Murphy — Wed, 14 May 2008 16:07:34 -0500

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!

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.

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.