If you ask Seagate, news of the impending death of hard drives (caused by the impending domination of NAND-type flash memory chips) is grossly exaggerated. Otherwise, the company wouldn't have announced its big plan for 2007, which includes 60 to 120GB drives for handheld video devices such as Apple's iPod video.

In an interview with Business Week, Seagate expressed faith in hard drives despite prediction that HD technology will give way to high-capacity flash memory. The company cited that the big three NAND flash memory makers in the world (Samsung, SanDisk, and Toshiba) are investing big money on their respective disk-drive business with no plans of shelving them .

Seagate believes HD will be around for a long time because they are cheaper. Seagate CEO William Watkins said, "It will be a price-per-gigabyte battle...if they can make a 4-GB for $5, then it's $20 for 32 GB, and $40 for 64 GB. On the other hand... when we do a single-platter, 100-GB notebook drive, well it doesn't cost me very much to go to 200 GB. All I have to do is add another platter. It's very cheap for me to go up."