5-Star Stocks Poised to Pop: Seagate Technology

• Report this Comment On December 04, 2008, at 4:59 PM, stevemason5 wrote:

  It all sounds good to me but - what about flash technology ?

  Today, I can buy a 32 GB USB 2.0 flash drive for $59.95 with free S&H. I know that you can buy a lot more storage in a hard drive for the same money. But, when the manufacturing economics of scale really kick in, hard drives will likely be substituted by flash drives.

  Currently, Seagate's manufacturing base is focused in hard drives. A switch to flash will not be cheap or easy. The flash manufacturers know what they have and will ask a premium price in an acquisition. Plus, there are similar "no moving parts" memory developments that will likely improve on flash.

  Which would you rather drop on a hard floor, a hard drive or a flash drive ? Which system would you trust more with you valuable programs, hard won and valuable information, proposals, pictures, movies, music, etc. ? Its a mechanical system vs. a solid state system.

  STX may be an okay investment. But Seagate better have a long term, well defined, executable and affordable response to flash and other emerging technology.

• Report this Comment On December 04, 2008, at 9:45 PM, yansh wrote:

  I strongly believe in Seagate's committment to the future and also customer satisfactions that is reflected in their products as well as custormer service. I have had many seagate hard drives and I would like to put this here that my 40 MB hard drive from my old 80286 PC still works. Now that PC was bought second hand as well as the drive in it. The computer has since broken down and thrown away. But I kept the drive and it still works. The waranty sticker stated that the waranty ends 1990. That is 18 years folks !

• Report this Comment On December 05, 2008, at 1:32 PM, stevemason5 wrote:

  I agree that Seagate hard drives are the best choice for consumers. It has the best guarantee and in my experience, excellent service. I just bought a Seagate HD for my laptop. The first one failed in 2 months. That was annoying but Seagate responded well and promptly shipped a replacement at no cost.

  My concern is not the quality of the Seagate HD's. That is pretty well established. My concern is Seagate's response to emerging technology - primarily flash and related solid state memory technology.

  I hope Seagate has a legitimate response to solid state tech other than making higher capacity hard drives at cheaper prices. More stuff for less dollars is the text book definition for commodity pricing. If it does not respond, Seagate will slowly lose out to a superior technology paradigm.

• Report this Comment On December 05, 2008, at 7:25 PM, yansh wrote:

  I guess that the whole deal with this flash thing is an entirely new value chain that shifts away from traditional storage device making. While the design process may be the same but the process of building these flash drives are entirely different. Hard drive folks who invested billions of dollars of customized equipment would have to scrap all those and star over. Flash drives do not employ the same manufacturing techniques. In fact anyone could simply sub contract the manufacturing process to PCB assembly houses like Solectron, Jabil Circuits and etc. Whilist in a hard drive manufacturing, the process involved specialized equipment and techology just to build these hard drives. And these are not cheap. Plus the fact that these equipment needs regular upgrade and maintenance. Hence it is a huge investment and extremely big numbers for Seagate.

  I believe that sometime down the road, winchester disk would still be around offering VERY VERY VERY reliable mass storage at a slower pace and at a low price. That means 1 major player in the market. And many many flash folks offering low capacity typically 50 - 200 GB flash storage at a slightly higher price. Hence the market would probably be divided into 2 segments. One segment are folks that need to access data quickly on the fly like the regular consumer applications; cameras, gaming PCs, wordprocessing and business applications in companies. The other segment would be the archiving section currently dominated by magnetic tapes. This section need mass storage to store old data. It would be easier for hard drives to dominate this section because they are definitely faster than tapes and their storage capacity is comparable too. We are talking about 1TB per hard drive. So that is how I see the future.

Add your comment.