HiFi Blog: digital audio goodness

Seagate CEO, Bill Watkins gave a very interesting interview on BusinessWeek regarding the recent increase of attention to flash memory chips, and how hard drives are going to compete. He admits that flash will always be more power-efficient, so it’ll find its way into devices where power consumption is of the outmost importance. But according to Watkins, hard drives aren’t as power hungry as they used to be, so they can be used in MP3 players just fine. Hard drive’s additional advantage against flash memory (besides its bigger capacities) is its higher data rates. At its current data rates, flash can’t handle high-quality video and audio. So he sees flash being used in devices with low capacity and low battery consumption, hard drives in high capacity devices and those that do stuff that needs high data rates (streaming video). The middle ground is where the two storage types will have to fight.

Additionally, he says they won’t follow Toshiba in making .85-inch hard drives, because with this form factor they won’t be able to maintain their 4-to-1 ratio with flash: offering 4 times as much as data as a flash chip for the same price. Instead, they’ll keep on with the 1-inch form factor. Other topics of discussion include: hard drives in cellphones and cars.