This is not your grampy’s hard drive.
SSD isn’t so great, guys, OK? When Steve was all like “SSD is the future! Blah de blah blah!” he definitely wasn’t thinking of those poor hard drive manufacturers who dumped a fortune into mechanical disk factories!
Quoth Seagate’s Steve Luczo:
I would say though that from what we know of the offering for example Apple, the percentage of their units that they sell with SSDs versus HDDs is a tiny fraction. I think it’s under 3 percent, certainly under 5 percent. Obviously this isn’t the first product that they’ve had.
Hear that? Nobody uses SSD. Even though Luczo admits to having an Air with an SSD built in. What is Luczo worried about?
My take? HDD manufacturers better get on the ball. As we learned from the iFixit teardown, the MBA contains a bare set of Toshiba flash chips without the standard 2.5-inch enclosure required by many laptops.
Generally, what the Seagate CEO is saying (and I’m sure he’s not worried that much) is that there is a massive install base of standard size drive users. OEMs can’t just go sizing their storage devices willy nilly – except, clearly, Apple. If more OEMs get on board, however, Seagate had better be ready to turn around with a quickness and start making oddly shaped storage components, be they mechanical or flash-based.
