Hard disk drive (HDD) players such as Seagate, have been pushing into the solid state drive (SSD) market via acquisitions or forming strategic alliances with SSD partners for the past several years. However, although demand for SSDs from the notebook market has been rising, Seagate senior vice president of global sales BS Teh believes that SSDs and HDDs will co-exist and develop together in the overall storage market, as there are many applications that still draw strong demand for HDDs.

In the solid state area, Seagate spent US$450 million in 2014 to acquire the flash business of LSI, an affiliate of Avago, and Seagate is planning to launch a 60TB SSD in 2017. The company also entered into a strategic alliance with flash maker Micron in 2015.

Teh expects nearly 90% of worldwide notebooks shipped to feature built-in SSDs within next five years. Demand for SSDs is likely to replace a large proportion of HDD demand in the notebook market, and Seagate will become more aggressive in its related development of SSDs.

However, the company will continue to put resources into HDD R&D, as the larger storage capacity of HDDs will still allow the product line to enjoy market demand in a number of areas. Seagate will continue to see demand for HDDs in areas such as surveillance, gaming, consumer electronics and datacenter markets. These non-PC businesses together already contribute over 40% of Seagate's revenues, and the company is looking to raise the percentage to 50% in the next three years.

By: DocMemory
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