Storage Effect

Storage “arms dealing”, the recession and the content revolution

Robert’s conducted a great interview with Seagate CEO Bill Watkins.  He really got Bill to open up, share what was on his mind.  Well, I guess that’s not that unusual…but it’s a great interview nonetheless!

Check it out 

Whatever the media, storage marches on

Here’s a fun read from Maximum PC: David Murphy’s interview of Seagate’s Bill Watkins.   He tells it like it is - which is a refreshing change from your average CEO.  Bill covers a lot of ground - worth the time if you’ve got it.

Takeaways for solution providers

• 1 TB sounds like a lot of storage, but it’s no larger than 5 MB was in 1979.  Like then, people will surprise themselves with how easily they fill it up.
• Your biggest storage opportunity is helping your customers use all of their data - not just what’s on their PC. 
• Your customers don’t care if it’s flash or disk or optical or green goo from Mars - they want storage that works for them.  Don’t get distracted. 
• DVDs and CDs are dinosaurs.  Electronic distribution is the new species, and demands lots of storage to enable it.

Answer the question “How much storage do you need?”

Seagate has a simple tool on seagate.com (under Useful Links on this page) that helps you figure out how much storage you or your customers need for desktop PCs, notebooks and home servers.  Plug in your content usage, and out pops some recommendations. 

Give it a try and report back on how much storage YOU need.  Also, any feedback on the tool?  What could make it more useful?

Tenfold notebook failure rates for SSDs vs. disk drives 

Engadget reports a 10X failure rate for SSDs in notebook PCs compared to hard drives.   Can you say “early adopter”? SSDs are an exciting future, but a future still for mainstream markets.

Reliability is relative, especially in terms of the technology being replaced.  The same goes for pricing - see my Flash tags posts.

Any flash early adopters out there?  What’s your experience with returns or failures, either personally or through solutions you’ve sold to someone?

Update: Yet another issue with flash as a near-term disk drive replacement: potential patent infringement issues. 

BluRay looks to win the battle, while electronic distribution wins the war  

Nortel’s CTO John Roese dreams about the possibilities of a 4G world on GigaOm, and it makes Seagate’s CEO Bill Watkins’ comments on the Format Wars ring very true.  Bill points out that the battle between BluRay and HD DVD has been incredibly overhyped, since the world is moving beyond DVDs as the entertainment medium of choice. 

Electronic distribution has quietly won the war, and the spoils go to spinning media. 

Consumers are downloading their movies onto their home computers at a torrential rate.  Home entertainment solutions that provide terabytes of capacity are the future. 

Actually, they’re here now, as anyone who walked the aisles at CES this year would know. 

PCs, Home Servers and Entertainment Systems (Apple TV?) are the combatants in the next battle that matters for consumer content.   Where will all of those terabytes of movies in the home reside?

Solid state drives are a winning solution - but when and where? 

Bill Watkins, CEO of Seagate, talked to X-bit labs about flash and SSDs.  Flash is exciting technology - just don’t expect it to replace tried and true disk drives in a big way any time soon. 

Despite all the noise about flash in notebook PCs, Bill sees the first true sweet spot for flash being in enterprise applications. For notebooks, much of the power, performance and reliability benefits of pure flash are either overstated or can be gained today for a much lower cost with hybrid drives. 

Hybrid drives combine flash with a disk drive and use the flash as a uber-cache, giving you the benefits of both technologies in one solution.

I’ve posted many time on this topic - here and here and here.

What say you?  Will you be plunking down the big bucks for a solid state notebook this year?

Bill Watkins on surveillance and the content subscription model

The BlogHaus was hopping last night.  CEO Bill Watkins came by and mixed with the blogger community.  He and Robert Scoble talked about how surveillance innovation and the content subscribtion subsidy business model are driving dramatic growth in storage. 

Add-on storage: not just for PCs any more!