X-bit labs

Maxtor “More Capable” of Making Perpendicular Media – Seagate Chief Executive Says.

Category: Storage

by Anton Shilov

[ 12/22/2005 | 04:23 PM ]

Seagate Technology’s chief executive officer told in an interview that Maxtor, the company that Seagate agreed to acquire just a day ago, had better abilities to make next-generation media than Seagate had. But the head of the world’s No.1 maker of hard disk drives would maintain its own roadmap and the reason why it had acquired Maxtor was intention to boost its revenue.

“We take their facilities, put our infrastructure in there and manufacture to their customer base – in what will become our customer base now. They utilize a lot of the same equipment we do, but they are more capable in making perpendicular media,” said Bill Watkins, chief executive for Seagate, in an interview with Computer World web-site.

Perpendicular recording gets its name from the vertical alignment of data bits on the plane of the disk, which takes less room in contrast to the horizontal orientation of today’s longitudinal recording technology. To be accurately recorded and read, the more closely-packed perpendicular bits also require a closer association between the read/write head and the recording media. Hitachi said earlier this year it had achieved the 230Gb/in2 density by manipulating the head and media so that the distance between them is a mere 10nm.

Seagate’s head also indicated that the company was satisfied with its product roadmap as well as manufacturing and platforms strategy. The company wanted to get customers and sales channels of Maxtor to leverage across the infrastructure the world’s largest hard disk drive (HDDs) currently owns. The company indicated that it would get “tremendous scale of value from that”.

Another reason why Seagate might want to acquire Maxtor was the group that developed enterprise-class HDDs within the company. Typically, enterprise class HDDs utilize both proven as well as state-of-the-art-technologies, which means that a company that develops leading enterprise-class hard drives will be competitive on the market of desktop HDDs as well. Seagate also indicated that it wanted engineering resources of Maxtor’s staff. Still, the company plans to utilize Seagate’s roadmap.

“The resources will allow us to increase our investment in fundamental technology, but our plan is to use Seagate’s technology roadmap. This is not going to be a major product innovation. They have some engineering we’re very interested in,” Mr. Watkins said.