Up to 1GB Flash memory is an option in terms of cost, power consumption, and robustness, but as capacity goes up, it starts to become too expensive, said Kevin O’Dwyer, sales director for consumer electronics at the Scotts Valley, California-based company. The pain point comes at 2GB, which is a capacity Flash can address but it becomes too expensive to include it in a mobile device. [Beyond that], if an app requires 3GB, 4GB, or 5GB, you need to look at a hard disk drive.
Seagate’s own microdrive is its ST1, a 1-inch, 5GB offering introduced in September, which has so far been picked up by vendors of portable entertainment devices. It is in two of the more expensive iPods from Apple, and earlier this week Seagate announced it had been selected by Korean manufacturer ReignCom for inclusion in its iRiver H10 digital music player range.
However, where O’Dwyer really expects HDD adoption to take off is in portable video devices. With video, the minimum capacity requirement is 10GB, which gives you about two full-length movies, he said. We currently max out at 6GB, and you can compress the files down further to meet screen size requirements.
He was saying nothing about the next capacity point for the microdrive range, which will receive its next upgrade in the third quarter, but it seems reasonable to assume that Seagate will be going for the 10GB slot. That said, O’Dwyer also noted that as video is likely to be offered alongside music and still photos in certain portable devices, the 1-inch format will be too small for such multi-application scenarios, which might require a 1.8-inch, which Seagate doesn’t currently offer, or even a 2.5-inch, which it does. Therefore, another possibility is that Seagate will add 1.8-inch drives to the portfolio. When we say we have products for 97% of the market, the remaining 3% is 1.8-inch, he said.
There are obstacles to be overcome before HDD become as commonplace in mobile devices as solid-state storage is today. These include power consumption, robustness, and physical integration into the handset. On the power side, until battery technology moves on, O’Dwyer said Seagate is working with manufacturers of MP3 and music players to make sure they use the most efficient algorithms, buffering and managing the number of start/stop operations that eat up battery power.
As for mobile business applications, O’Dwyer said the situation is still playing itself out. Email, where 2MB and 3MB attachments have become the norm, will tend to drive storage requirements, he said, particularly as available bandwidth increases on networks. PowerPoint will take a while longer, he added. Then there is the offline work paradigm for mobile devices where he said there will be OS implications. If it’s a Windows application, you’re going to need a Microsoft OS on the phone, he said, but the handset guys have tended to steer clear so far.
