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No matter how many times Seagate denied to me over the years that it was staying out of the flash memory market I never believed a word. Why? Because it was fibbing...

This fact was established yesterday when Seagate CEO Bill Watkins conceded to the Wall Street Journal that "We have solid-state drives on every road map that we have."

The inevitable - if perhaps surprisingly frank - admission was not elaborated on further during the interview but I would suspect the company's first steps will be to follow this up with a line of Hybrid Hard Drives.

I've covered this technology before (first way back in October 2005), but for the cheap seats it adds a proportionately small amount of solid state memory to a traditional hard drive to act like a buffer for frequently accessed data. Think of it like ReadyBoost that works...

Looking further into the future Seagate also knows that flash memory capacities increase exponentially so an eventual catch up with the currently far more capacious moving parts drives will eventually occur.

I have to ask Seagate however, quite how it didn't see this coming earlier and why on earth it sold its near 40 per cent holding in SanDisk a few years back? A silly move if ever there was one.

Still, at least it isn't fibbing anymore...

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