“We have seen a very strong push towards SATA drives”

Seagate is bullish about emerging technology trends in the hard disk drive market. Teh Ban Seng, vice president & managing director, Asia Pacific, Seagate Technology elaborates on the company's strategy for India in an interview with Abhinav Singh

* There are some exciting disk technologies that promise to change the face of enterprise storage-SAS and SATA. How does SATA compare vis-à-vis, PATA, SCSI or upcoming SAS?

SATA (Serial Attached Advanced Technology Attachment) drives are primarily targeted at the desktop market and entry-level servers. We are seeing a strong push towards SATA drives due to the high performance capabilities they offer compared to the traditional PATA (Parallel Advanced Technology Attachment). PATA is reaching its limit and we won't be able to design products at a higher transfer rate (the rate at which data is transferred from the drive to the host system). SATA drives facilitate easier cable connectivity and the reliability of data transfer is also high. The first generation of SATA drives offer a transfer rate of 150 Mbps, whereas the PATA drive can reach a maximum transfer rate of 133 Mbps. We have observed that in emerging markets such as India, the demand for SATA drives will increase rapidly and many of them would be used in entry-level servers.

When compared with SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) products, SATA comes at much lower price tag and this can be as low as half the price of a SCSI unit. However SATA drives work well with single drive applications whereas a SCSI drive can work in a multi-drive or in a multi-user application environment.

* How does SAS compare with SCSI?

SAS (Serial Attached Small computer system interface) drives are not available in the Indian market. SAS can deliver a much higher performance than normal SCSI. SCSI has a maximum transfer rate of 320 Mbps. Compared to that SAS starts at 300 Mbps. We are expecting that future generations of SAS drives will have a transfer rate of 600 Mbps. We have been working on SAS technology for a couple of years now and should be launching some products soon.

* Which are the applications that will drive the adoption of your 'ST1' products? How does ST1 compare with flash memory?

'ST1' products are aimed at handheld devices such as PDAs and MP3 players. We have entered into OEM relationships with Rio Audio and Creative Technology, makers of MP3 players. Flash memory is seven to eight times more expensive than ST1. However as the flash memory is an electronic memory with just a chip (Integrated Circuit) it is more robust, has lower power consumption and faster speed but its capacities are limited. Today we have seen a flash memory with just 1 GB of capacity whereas the ST1 product offers five times that. Many OEMs are thinking of migrating to hard disc drives (ST1) as the demand for storage increases.

* What is your Storage Application Model (SAM)?

SAM is an interactive tool that helps users choose a hard disc drive as per their requirements. It helps customers understand that each application has its own set of critical levels .

* Does Seagate sell its drives for use in a storage array from any of the storage majors?

Yes, we have customers in the storage space including HP and EMC. As far as the server vendors are concerned we have the top ten server vendors as our customers across the globe.

* Can you explain your business initiatives for enterprises?

We value enterprise storage. This is a strong market for us although the volumes have not grown as far as Unix shipments are concerned. In the enterprise segment the amount of storage capacity is growing but the requirement for disc drives has not gone up. However our commitment to the market remains-- we were one of the first to bring out a 10,000 RPM drive, we have also been among the first to come up with a Fibre Channel product. The Savvio drive was an initiative to get into the 2.5 inch drive, aimed at enterprise storage. It can be plugged into blade and 1U servers.

India is one of the fastest growing enterprise storage markets in the world. A very small percentage of data is in digital format in India, which of course is bound to increase, thereby driving the requirement for hard disc drives. We have been participating in CTO and the CIO-based events in India on a regular basis to promote our products. We have targeted certain CIOs and CTOs from the banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) segment in particular.