This is in line with the company's strategy to develop new technologyproducts which can go into immediate production when the market requirementopens up. To this end, the company was in the process of developing highstorage disk media which could have storage capacities of close to 50GB persq inch, Maher said. Among the new products in the pipeline, Seagate's 65 mmdisk (for high performance note book applications) christened Mercury is inthe early stages of development.

``With the technology advances, the industry is likely to see fewer disksand more storage capacity in drives across various devices. Disks with 10-15GB per square inch are likely to hit the market in one year while thecapacities will go up to over 30 GB per sq inch in two years,'' he said. Asfor new media diss, the company's technology team had already developedstorage disks made of glass and was likely to demonstrate the product soon,Maher said. ``Our R&D team will continously develop new technology products.Our strategy is to keep these products ready so that we can send it forproduction as and when there is a requirement,'' he added.

On the investment front, Seagate senior vice-president (disk driveoperations) Michael C Stears said that the company was planning investmentsin low cost automation lines that could be used to produce a number ofdifferent products.

``Technology is driving down the cost of drives. Quieter application-baseddrives, increased integration of parts on a board and developments ininterfaces can be expected. 100 GB capacity demonstrations will go onstreamwithin two years,'' Stears said. While the company did not make figuresavailable on pricing, they said the costs would depend on market conditions.However, prices would definitely be competitive, they said. With most of theproducts in the development stage they would not hit the market immediatelyunless there was a specific requirement.

As for Seagate's RMO operations, the company currently manufactures close to90 million disks per year and has seven worldwide manufacturing facilities.The facilities supply media exclusively to the Seagate's drive assemblyplants and were currently meeting the requirements, Maher said. Operationswere expeced to be ramped up - going by estimates that indicate increaseddemand while a consolidation of manufacturing facilities was also underway,Stears said.