Earnings season starts this week for tech companies, and no one is expecting outstanding second-quarter results. If the reports turn out to be weaker than expected, then tech investors might run for the hills, the San Jose Mercury News reported.

The world economy has been shaky, mainly due to a slowdown in Europe. Demand for PCs, corporate computing gear, and software may have had a weak quarter. China’s economy is slowing, hurting the growth of the PC market, according to Bloomberg. And some suppliers to the PC market have warned about weaker financials.

Starting on Tuesday, Intel and Yahoo will report their second-quarter earnings. They will be followed by eBay and IBM on Wednesday; Google, Advanced Micro Devices, SanDisk, and Microsoft report on Thursday. Apple reports on July 24.

“Weakness is broad and is spreading in tech land,” Ambrish Srivastava, a financial analyst at BMO Capital Markets, warned in a report, the Mercury News said.

Apple is expected to have a good quarter, but there’s a chance that its sales will level off as consumers wait for an as-yet-unannounced new version of the iPhone. Facebook, on the other hand, has seen its stock price falter, bringing social game maker Zynga down with it. Yahoo has had a tough time with its CEO turnover.

Hewlett-Packard, Dell, IBM, and Intel will rise or fall based on sales in the commercial tech sector. Advanced Micro Devices, a maker of microprocessors, and Applied Materials, the largest maker of semiconductor manufacturing equipment, warned that their sales would be lower than expected. Seagate, the storage giant, also offered a warning.

Nobody is expecting an outlook as gloomy as the 2008 financial crash.

Here’s the schedule for upcoming earnings announcements:

Tuesday July 17: Intel, Yahoo
Wednesday July 18: eBay, IBM
Thursday July 19: Google, AMD, SanDisk, Microsoft
July 23: VMware, THQ
July 24: Apple, Netflix, Juniper Networks, EMC
July 25: Symantec, Zynga
July 26: Facebook, Informatica
July 30: EA, Yelp, Seagate
Aug. 2: Activision, LinkedIn
Aug. 9: Nvidia
Aug. 13: GameStop, Groupon
Aug. 21: Dell
Aug. 22: HP

When you’re out in the great outdoors, the last thing you want is to run out of videos to watch and music to listen to. OK, sarcasm aside, Seagate is launching a very cool gadget that will let you take your entire media collection out into the wilderness with you.

Unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the Seagate Wireless Plus is like a portable hard drive that you can carry with you. It is not connected to the Internet, but it can stream media stored on it to as many as eight smartphones or tablets at a time. If you’re driving in a car, it can stream a video to you and a song to your sibling sitting next to you.

The device has a 1 terabyte hard drive, with enough space to store up to 500 high-definition movies. With a 10-hour battery, it lets you extend the limits of today’s mobile lifestyle, said Greg Falgiano, senior product marketing manager at Seagate, in an interview with VentureBeat. That makes it a good match for the battery life of most smartphones and tablets, he said.

“You can access your content when you are off the grid — in the middle of the desert or on an island in the Pacific Ocean,” he said.

Now you can access your media when you’re on a long road trip or a flight, without an Internet connection. The device actually creates its own Wi-Fi network in a local area and uses that to stream the media to your devices.

You can access the device using the mobile Seagate Media app for Apple iOS, Android, and Kindle Fire HD devices. It works with any device that can connect to a Wi-Fi network. You can access your Seagate Wireless Plus media using Apple Airplay, which projects it onto a big screen TV. You can also access it via DLNA connections or Samsung Smart TVs and Blu-ray players.

Seagate debuted its first device in this category in 2011.

“Smartphones and tablets offer amazing new opportunities for Seagate to provide new consumer storage solutions in an increasingly mobile world,” said Scott Horn, vice president of Marketing at Seagate. “Seagate developed the concept of wireless storage to free consumers to enjoy their documents, movies, photos, and music anywhere in the world, especially when they can’t connect to the Internet. Seagate Wireless Plus builds on the success of our first generation product and takes it even further.”

The drive comes with a removable SuperSpeed USB 3.0 adapter for quick loading of media. The Wireless Plus has its own Wi-Fi network so that you don’t need to stream or download your content from the Internet or spend money on a data plan.

Brett Sappington, director of research at Parks Associates, said that less than half of U.S. mobile phone users are highly satisfied with the storage of their mobile phone, and 20 percent are dissatisfied with their mobile storage capacity. The Seagate Wireless Plus device is available from Amazon and BestBuy.com for $200. The device replaces Seagate’s GoFlex Satellite and competes with the Kingston Wi-Drive, Transcend StoreJet Cloud, Maxell AirStash A02, and the Buffalo MiniStation Air. Seagate says its advantage is more storage for the buck and ease of use.

In another announcement at CES, Seagate said it is launching Seagate Central, an external backup drive that lets you gather all of your home data in one location. It lets you set up automatic backups for a bunch of computing devices, and it works across both Windows and Mac computers. Once you gather your content, you can access it from all of your devices, including computers, smartphones, and tablets.

Robert Rodriguez, senior product marketing manager at Seagate, said the Seagate Central device replaces the GoFlex Home. You can upload or download data to the device via Wi-Fi, 3G, or 4G connections.

The device is shipping in March. It comes in several sizes: two terabytes for $189, three terabytes for $219, and four terabytes for $259. You can make it secure by setting up a username and password. It works with USB 3.0 cables.

Our never-ending hunger for data is helping Seagate make lots of money.

The hard drive manufacturer said today that it’s finally shipped its 2 billionth drive. Seagate says it attributes the feat in large part to the tech world’s newfound addiction to data-intensive streaming video services and social networks.

The most telling metric is this one: Seagate says it took it 29 years to ship a billion drives, but it only took it four years to reach its second billion. That makes our hunger for data sound like full-blown gluttony.

Of course, it also doesn’t hurt that Seagate is one half of the hard drive duopoly shared with rival Western Digital, which, like Seagate, has made a habit of scooping up competitors (Seagate bought Lacie last year, for example, and Samsung’s hard drive business in 2011).This has created a largely uncontested space for the two big players, so it’s not the biggest surprise that Seagate’s doing so well.

GUEST:

This is a guest post by Gary Gentry, SVP of solid state drives at Seagate.

“Flash or disk?” That question — whether the future of data storage would be defined by flash memory or hard drives — has been a looming battle in the storage industry for the last several years.

Hard drives, of course, remain the heart of the storage industry. Manufacturers shipped 524 million disk drives in 2012, according to iSuppli, more than ten times the 39 million flash drives that were shipped in the same period. Worldwide manufacturing capacity for drives at the end of 2012 came to around 125,000 petabytes per quarter, compared to around 10,000 petabytes per quarter for flash. By volume, hard drives are tough to beat.

But look at the growth rates, say flash advocates. Shipments will grow from 39 million units in 2012 to 83 million units in 2013. By 2016, 239 million flash drives will be shipping annually, propelled by sales of tablets, smartphones, and notebooks. Enterprise arrays based on flash will also gain a stronger following among corporate buyers like banks and technology firms with an excruciating need for speed. Flash might be in the minority, argue advocates, but it has time on its side.

The debate, however, ignores a critical variable that changes the whole tenor of the debate. And that variable is the rate of data growth. The opportunity and demand is simply too large for either technology alone. When you start to look at it in that context, you can start to see that the future really isn’t “flash versus disk.” Instead, it’s “flash and disk.”

Online auction house eBay, for instance, recently said it installed 100 petabytes of storage last year. Two terabytes is the same amount of information contained in all of the U.S. research libraries. The company’s big data servers come with twelve drives containing two terabytes each.

“It is the storage, stupid,” Dean Nelson, eBay’s vice president of Global Foundation Services, told ReadWrite recently. “The volume of growth of storage is insane.”

IDC estimates that the total amount of digital information in the world grew 48 percent to 2.7 zettabytes in 2012. And a huge portion of that new data is unstructured files like YouTube videos and audio files.

On top of that, add in the data that will be generated by valves, security cameras, light bulbs, and the other residents of the coming “Internet of Things.” The world will need both disk and flash because it will need as much storage capacity as it can get its hands on. Gartner reports that many of its clients expanded their storage requirements by 80 percent in 2010, 2011, and 2012.

Economics play a role too. It’s simply far less expensive to manufacture drives. A new facility for producing hard drives costs about $35 to $50 million and can be operational in about four months. A similar flash factory that can produce 100,000 wafers a month costs about $4 billion and takes two years to build. It would take $210 billion in factory investments to displace 15 percent of the demand for drives in 2014, according to Gartner. Partly as result, disk drives will invariably cost less. By 2016, a 2TB drive will cost manufacturers $39 to $45 to produce while a 300GB SSD drive will cost $90 to $100.

Displacing all of the demand for drives would take more than $1 trillion of new investment. Besides being impractical, a sudden surge in investment would likely plunge the semiconductor industry into a massive slump.

So does this mean flash won’t play a significant role? Not at all. At Seagate, we’ve been investing in flash and shipping flash-based products for more than four years and will continue to expand our flash portfolio.

Flash will be deployed strategically. Flash drives will likely take over markets where power consumption and size outweigh cost and capacity. Tablets will be dominated by flash: no one is going to put a hard drive in a lightweight tablet or e-book reader. Notebooks will come with flash drives or hybrid drives, which combine both technologies. Back-up drives, desktops, and set-top boxes will likely veer toward traditional disk drives.

In enterprises, most servers will come with a traditional drive or a hybrid drive alone with a flash-based PCIe card to accelerate the flow of data. Flash-based storage arrays will handle the most time-sensitive jobs but be backed by even larger arrays of disks. Flash-based PCIe cards are another opportunity to expand.

Some manufacturers have also begun to develop storage systems with server capabilities. With these systems, storage effectively becomes the focal point of the data center, not the computer.

Drives will experience a quantum leap in performance with the introduction of heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) that will increase density to over a terabit per square inch. Flash manufacturers, however, will follow up with memory devices made with three-dimensional transistors a few years later. Every reaction will lead to a complimentary reaction.

The technology world might want to see a battle between standards and technologies. But instead, it’s most likely going to get an uneasy truce.

Gary Gentry is senior vice president of solid state at Seagate. Gentry has over 25 years of experience in the storage industry, including most recently as the general manager of the Enterprise SSD Division of Micron Corporation. Prior to rejoining Seagate, he held leadership positions focusing on solid-state technologies at Spansion Corporation and Storage Genetics.

Close up of hard disk with abstract reflection via kubais/Shutterstock

Storage giant Seagate has made a strategic equity investment in custom chip design firm eASIC.

The companies didn’t disclose the amount of the deal.

On top of the investment, both companies are exploring the chance to jointly develop custom chips for Seagate’s portfolio of solid state drives — the flash memory-based cards that are replacing hard disk drives in many computers.

Seagate has been launching more of its own solid state drives (SSDs) in response to the changing market for corporate data storage: Flash chips, which are low-power, fast, and expensive, increasingly compete on a better cost footing with cheap, power-hungry, and slow hard disk drives in corporate data centers.

eASIC is a kind of middleman that makes it easier for chip designers to create custom chips that they can bring to market much faster than traditional custom semiconductors. Flash chips are getting more complex to design as the number of interfaces that interact with them multiply. Seagate and eASIC want to craft high-performance, low-cost, and low-power chips that can be targeted at consumer, enterprise, and cloud markets.

“eASIC has demonstrated innovative custom silicon technology with our industry-leading solid state hybrid drives (SSHDs)”, said Rocky Pimentel, chief sales and marketing officer at Seagate, in a statement. “eASIC’s ability to quickly develop custom differentiated solutions while meeting stringent cost, power and performance requirements will enable us to rapidly deliver storage solutions and improve our product position in both SSD and SSHD’s.”

“We are extremely excited to be working with one of the world leaders in storage technology,” said Ronnie Vasishta, president and chief executive of eASIC. “Seagate has an exceptional history in bringing world class technology and innovation to the storage market. Using our eASIC [technology] will help Seagate to bring storage innovation at a pace not yet seen in this industry.”

Acquisition news usually does not get included in Funding Daily, but today I am making an exception. Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for $250 million. As a journalist and D.C. native, this news strikes pretty close at home. I wrote a lengthy report on Katharine Graham in middle school and my fellow high school newspaper editors and I spent hours poring over the Post’s pages for inspiration. I know this news does not mean that the Post will go away, but certainly it is the end of an era. Here is to the Graham family, you had a good ride.

FireEye brings more legitimacy to new security solutions with IPO filing

Security company FireEye filed to go public last week, joining only a handful of security companies to IPO in the last two years. FireEye monitors your company’s network by setting up virtual machines that watch anything coming in or out of the system. It learns what malware activity looks like and then stops anything it recognizes as a threat in the virtual machine before it ever reaches you. According to the filing, the company has proposed a maximum aggregate offering price of $175 million. Read more on VentureBeat. 

Clutch puts $5.3M into its own mobile wallet 

Mobile payments startup Clutch has raised $5.3 million in its second round of funding. Clutch has built a mobile wallet, shopping consumer app, and merchant platform. It stores cards and coupons, and also offers daily deals, trending products, shopping searches, price comparisons, and gifting features.  Safeguard Scientifics led the round for this Philadelphia-based company, with participation from previous investors Ben Franklin Technology Partners. Clutch also announced the acquisition of loyalty and gifting startup ProfitPoint.

Maxwell Health gets $2M to help employers manage their health plans

New York-based startup Maxwell Health just raised $2 million to help employers set up affordable health and wellness plans. It’s a particularly useful tool for entrepreneurs and small business owners, as Maxwell Health offers guidance on the various health insurance plans, financial benefits, spending accounts, life insurance, and payroll. The company raised its funding from Tribeca Venture Partners, with participation from Lerer Ventures, Vaizra Investments, BoxGroup, and additional New York and Boston-based investors, including TiE Angels. Read more on VentureBeat. 

Blue Wireless sees green with $3.1M in funding

English company Blu Wireless has raised $3.1 million for its 60GHz wireless IP. Blu Wireless’s technology enables faster file transfers, wireless display, docking and streaming of HD media on a variety of devices. Qi3 Accelerator led this round, which represents a syndicate of London Business Angels private investors, including Wren Capital.

Socrative ponders $750K in seed financing

Socrative has raised $750K in seed financing from True Ventures, NewSchools Venture Fund, and angel invests. The Boston-based startup offers a mobile and web-based student response system that helps teachers engage their students through educational exercise and games, via smartphones, laptops, and tablets.

Seagate invests in custom chip design firm eASIC

Storage giant Seagate has made a strategic equity investment in custom chip design firm eASIC. The companies didn’t disclose the amount of the deal. On top of the investment, both companies are exploring the chance to jointly develop custom chips for Seagate’s portfolio of solid state drives: the flash memory-based cards that are replacing hard disk drives in many computers. Read more on VentureBeat.

RecruitLoop follow its nose to $500K

RecruitLoop has raised half a million dollars for its platform that connects recruiters with employers. Employers can search for recruiters in its marketplace and hire them on an hourly basis, so they don’t have to pay commission for success fees. The company started out in Australia and has opened an office in San Francisco. The funding came from private investors in Australia, Singapore, the UAE, and Europe.

Seagate is launching a new cloud storage platform today that it says will fundamentally alter the economics for internet infrastructure.

The Cupertino, Calif.-based storage giant says that its Seagate Kinect Open Storage platform is a big leap in scalable storage for the enterprise. It simplifies data management, improves performance and scalability, and lowers the cost of owning cloud infrastructure by up to 50 percent.

“Our internal R&D teams have designed an unique, first-of-its-kind storage architecture to enable cheaper, more scalable object storage solutions that free up IT professionals from having to invest in hardware and software they don’t need— while empowering them with the most innovative storage technology available,” said Rocky Pimentel, Seagate executive vice president and chief sales and marketing officer. “This technology optimizes storage solutions for a new era of cloud storage systems, while drastically reducing overall costs.”

The platform gets rid of the storage server tier of data centers by enabling applications to speak directly to the storage device. It reduces expenses associated with the acquisition, deployment, and support of hyperscale storage infrastructures. Companies can realize additional cost savings by reducing their hardware and cutting out power and cooling costs. 

Among the customers trying out the new technology is Yahoo.

“At Yahoo, we’re always looking for new ways to improve efficiency and simplicity of our infrastructure and we’re excited about Seagate’s Kinetic Open Storage platform. Industry has proven time and again that Ethernet always wins— seeing this down to the drive level is a fantastic optimization,” said Kevin Graham, principle storage architect, Yahoo Infrastructure Group. “To that point, we’ve been engaging with Seagate for the past several months on how we can leap ahead of the architectural status quo to provide the most efficient, reliable storage for our users.”

Seagate will launch a new applications programming interface (API) that it will make available under an open source license for connecting Ethernet with Seagate’s hard drives. Seagate said it has a lot of support from companies such as Dell, Basho Technologies, EVault, Huawei, Rackspace, Newisys, Supermicro, and SwiftStack.

“Seagate’s ambitious move into the storage platform space is a natural extension to their core storage business and their new Kinetic Open Storage platform is one that could redefine how data centers are architected going forward,” said, Laura DuBois program vice president IDC Storage Systems, Software and Solutions. “Implementing this technology will empower data centers with more scalable solutions at an industry-low TCO— driving change in the world of storage.”

Seagate is announcing today it is launching a 2-terabyte hard disk drive for the Microsoft Xbox One and Xbox 360 video game consoles.

Making the announcement at the Gamescom fan show in Cologne, Germany, Seagate said it has created the new storage device specifically in mind for Xbox gamers. The machine could easily store data for more than 50 games, considering that most game installs take up 35 gigabytes to 50 gigabytes these days.

Seagate made a strategic marketing relationship with Microsoft, in part because Microsoft controls what external disk drives can be connected to an Xbox One or Xbox 360.

“With all of the new and amazing titles expected for this holiday season and a ton more games coming in the future, Xbox gamers will need even more storage and portability,” said Matt Kesselring, business development manager for Microsoft’s designed for Xbox partner program, in a statement. “Microsoft is privileged to be working with Seagate as our trusted partner for this important designed for Xbox peripheral.”

With the Seagate Game Drive for Xbox, you will no longer have to delete so many games from your console’s library. The disk uses a USB 3.0 connection, and it has a green top-case and black body, embossed with both the Xbox and Seagate logos.

“This exciting new collaboration with Microsoft Xbox is an important milestone for Seagate that will help us to reach a new audience which has an insatiable appetite for storage,” said Jeff Fochtman, senior director of product marketing for Seagate, in a statement. “There was a clearly defined need in this market for additional plug-and-play storage, and
Seagate is happy to be able to provide the solution.”

The drive will retail for $110 at GamesStop, Best Buy, Amazon, and other consumer electronic retailers worldwide.

Above: Close-up of Seagate’s 2-terabyte hard drive for Xbox One and Xbox 360

Image Credit: Seagate

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Seagate is unveiling a whole family of 8-terabyte hard disk drives for enterprise applications. The new drives will address markets such as enterprise computers, network-attached storage, and “kinetic hard disk drives.”

The aim is to lower the total cost of ownership for storage in a variety of markets. The Cupertino, Calif.-based storage giant is targeting everyone from small businesses to large enterprises with the portfolio of 8TB drives.

“Customers today need storage solutions to support a diverse, and sometimes very specialized, set of applications and workload requirements,” said Scott Horn, vice president of marketing at Seagate, in a statement. “In designing our products, we look closely at the type of data being stored, performance needs, power requirements, environmental operating conditions, network topologies, uptime demand and more, to ensure our customers receive the right storage technology for the job. This thoughtful approach has enabled us to deliver the most compelling 8TB portfolio available in the industry.”

The first product is a 3.5-inch hard disk drive with 8TB of capacity. The performance is 100 percent higher than the random read/write performance of the previous generation of 6TB drives. Supermicro said it will have a line of storage equipment available using the Seagate drives.

Seagate is also launching its enterprise network-attached storage (NAS HDD) for small businesses that plan on growing rapidly. The product is more densely packed into a tower or rack-mount solution, and it has lower overall power consumption, as well.

And Seagate is launching its latest Kinetic HDD, or hard drives for cloud data centers that need to access storage at extremely high speeds. The Kinetic devices allow computers to access data quickly, without going through lots of layers of software. Seagate estimates the overall cost savings from the Kinetic drives to be about 70 percent. A terabyte has 1,000 gigabytes, or a thousand billion bytes of storage.

In a conference call with the press, Seagate product marketing manager Joni Clark said that by 2020,  44 zettabytes (ZB) of data will be created globally, and 13 ZB will need to be stored. Only about 6.5 ZB will be available to handle that capacity, Clark said.

“That’s a huge amount, and most of that data will live in the cloud,” Clark said. “We can’t build enough storage capacity to store 13 zettabytes.”

Seagate has shipped 2.4 billion drives to date, or 17 percent more than its nearest competitor, according to STX market research. The drives are shipping at future dates.

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Seagate is launching an eight-terabyte hard disk drive for security applications. Equally interesting is where the company is doing this. The storage giant unveiled its Seagate Surveillance HDD at the China Public Security Expo 2015 in Shenzhen, China.

China has a huge appetite for storage since it conducts so much surveillance on behalf of its government and military. China is thus a natural market for Seagate’s biggest hard disk drives. But demand for data is exploding. IBM estimates that 90 percent of the world’s data was created in just the last two years.

Surveillance ranks high in terms of applications for storage, as it takes a lot of hard drives to store video from ubiquitous surveillance cameras. Seagate is targeting surveillance system integrators, end users, and system installers.

“Seagate has worked closely with the top surveillance manufacturers to evolve the features of our Surveillance HDD products and deliver a customized solution that has precisely matched market needs in this evolving space for the last 10 years,” said Matt Rutledge, Seagate’s senior vice president of client storage, in a statement.

Seagate announced it is shipping a 10-terabyte helium-filled hard disk drive for enterprise customers.

The new 3.5-inch hard disk — Seagate’s first such drive — is targeted at the growing storage requirements for private and public cloud-based data centers.

Western Digital, archrival of the Cupertino, Calif.-based Seagate, started shipping its own 10-terabyte hard drive in December. Seagate’s customers for the new drive include Huawei and Alibaba, two of China’s tech giants.

“Cloud-based data center storage needs are expanding faster than many current infrastructures can sustain, rendering the capacity demands of users a herculean task for cloud managers,” said Mark Re, senior vice president and chief technology officer at Seagate, in a statement. “Built on our years of research and development of sealed-drive technology, our new helium-based enterprise drive is designed precisely to help data-centric organizations worldwide solve the needs of their growing storage business.”

The drive is a modern marvel. It has seven platters and 14 heads, and the drive seals in helium to create a quiet, turbulence-free environment, decreasing both friction and resistance on the platters and delivering a low power-per-terabyte ratio. It has 25 percent more density than past drives. Customers from Alibaba and Huawei have said that they can get better storage capacity and lower power usage in the data center.

“At-scale data centers are faced with the challenge of efficiently storing massive amounts of unstructured digital data,” said John Rydning, vice president and analyst at market researcher IDC. “Seagate’s new 10TB HDD for enterprise data centers is its first product to employ helium technology and will help data center customers to expand storage capacity economically.”

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Seagate announced today that it is increasing planned layoffs from 1,600 to 6,500 positions, as the hard drive maker tries to navigate a global decline in PC sales.

Just two weeks ago, the company revealed the original job cut plans. But in a fourth quarter earnings preview, executives decided to up that figure. The new 6,500 job cuts amounts to 14 percent of the company’s global workforce.

In the earnings preview for its fourth quarter, the company said it will report revenue of $2.65 billion and gross margins of 25 percent. That’s better than Seagate’s own forecast of $2.3 billion and margins of 23 percent. The company said it will ship 37 million hard drives.

Despite the positive quarter, Seagate is apparently bracing itself for a tough long-term outlook.

“The evolution of mobile and cloud data driven environments continues to define itself as requiring significant amounts of mass storage,” said Steve Luczo, chairman and CEO of Seagate, in a statement. “Seagate will continue to evolve its product offering, technology investment and manufacturing footprint to best serve our customers.”

Seagate is launching a new 512-gigabyte SDD drive for the Xbox One game console. The company’s emphasis will be on fast booting and loading.

Big hard drives and extra storage are a must for most hardcore players, as the average game takes up about 35 gigabytes of data. At that size, it doesn’t take long to fill up a hard drive.

The Seagate Game Drive for Xbox SSD uses flash storage to improve the gaming experience. Helping people get into the action quicker, the Seagate Game Drive reduces waiting at welcome screens and enables quicker transitions between levels in top titles like Forza Horizon 3 and Gears of War 4.

With limited console internal drive capacity and game install sizes continuing to increase, players are looking for ways to expand storage. With 512GB of capacity, the Seagate Game Drive lets gamers store approximately 15 of their favorite titles and downloadable content. Individuals can archive less frequently played games on their console and keep a huge library of releases at their fingertips on the drive.

Seagate Game Drive features easy setup and installation. The sleek and stylish aluminum enclosure also complements the Xbox ecosystem. It doesn’t need a power cable, and its compact size makes it perfect for bringing to a friend’s house. Seagate previously launched a 2-terabyte and 4-terabyte external hard drive for the Xbox One in 2015.

The Seagate Game Drive for Xbox SSD will sell for $200, and it will be available in November at Amazon, GameStop, and other consumer-electronics retailers.

Chandrakant Patel has a deep history working on hardware and fundamental science at Hewlett-Packard, and he has used that background to create a vision for the future of technology that combines the physical and digital worlds.

He hopes to inspire his fellow HP colleagues and the rest of the tech world on a new decades-long path. Patel is a senior fellow and the chief engineer at Hewlett-Packard. That’s an important and rare position, as HP has more than 50,000 employees in 170 countries, with many thousands of engineers. I met Patel at the 50th anniversary of HP Labs in Palo Alto, and we caught up for an interview after that event at a very special place for HP employees: the original garage at a home on Addison Street in Palo Alto, Calif., where HP was born in 1939.

Patel’s job is to inspire HP’s engineers to be creative when thinking about the big technology problems they must overcome. After all, Moore’s Law — or doubling the number of transistors on a chip every couple of years — doesn’t just happen. It is the result of a lot of smart people figuring out the toughest technical problems of the day. Patel believes that we still have to figure out a much more energy efficient world network, with intelligent devices at the edge that don’t drain resources out of the data centers.

We talked about why he chose to stay with the PC and printer maker, HP, rather than HP Enterprise, the services company, after last year’s split-up. And we reminisced about HP’s past, including the creation of its first computer 50 years ago this week. Patel is very passionate about how students should study the fundamentals of science — and both hardware and software — to prepare themselves for the age of the Internet of Things. He prefers to call this the “cyber physical” applications, which expose the seams between hardware and software, between the real world and the digital.

We chatted there so that we could get inspired about the history of technology and where it’s going in the future. Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation. I’ve also added many of Patel’s slides, as he loves to paint his ideas of the future by making sketches.

Above: The future is cyber physical.

Image Credit: HP

Chandrakant Patel: I’m a mechanical engineer. I started at an interesting time in Silicon Valley. My first interview was with a company called Dysan. It was on Patrick Henry Drive. Patrick Henry was brand new. Now the stadium is very close to it. They were making disks. Heads and media were done here. I got a job at Memorex, where Nvidia is now located.

A long time ago, Memorex had that commercial – “Is it live or is it Memorex?” Ella Fitzgerald would shatter a glass with the frequency of her voice. They’d copy it to a Memorex tape, and then playing back the tape would shatter the glass too.

The reason it’s important to me is it was a prime time commercial. People understood why the glass broke. People understood physical fundamentals, back in the early ‘80s. I found myself in what I called the “valley of tinkerers.” Memorex had its share. Al Shugart, Finis Conner. They went on to create Seagate. We had manufacturing and design there.

I was making drives where the mass was 100 kilograms. A gigabyte would cost $100,000 and it was the size of a washing machine. Because the mass was very high and the stiffness was low, the frequency, the characteristic frequency of the drive was low. Low-frequency vibrations could damage it. As mechanical engineers we had interesting problems to solve.

VentureBeat: It was an age of physical hardware.

Patel: Very much so. Understanding how physical hardware worked. Discs were rotating at 3600 RPM, 32 heads, how do you keep them flying? Then one thing I noticed was, as the hardware got smaller, the drives got smaller, I felt the stiffness was going up. The mass went down. The ratio of stiffness to mass goes [up] and the natural frequency goes up. They’re less susceptible to those low-frequency vibrations. It was simple first-order fundamentals-based thinking to see that drives would be commoditized.

I reset myself, after working on large drives and small drives. I joined HP Labs in 1991 to work on the PA-RISC chip. We were going from wire bonds to the flip chip to get a lot more I/Os out of the chip. I established the chip packing and thermal management. I did a lot of work on electronics cooling. That’s when I got to know Bill. Subsequently I felt that chips would come from one or two places. As you scale down you need volume.

Above: Chandrakant Patel is an HP senior fellow and chief engineer. He is standing at HP’s original garage headquarters.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

I moved out into systems, working on large-scale systems like Superdome, the supercomputer-class systems we were building. In the mid-’90s I went to my boss and said, “The data center is the computer. The building is the computer.” I filled a room with racks that I said would be about 10 kilowatts, filled with industry-standard components. Now the building is the value add, not the servers. It is the networking, the cooling, the power—power, ping, and pipe. Those three Ps would determine the data center and the total cost of ownership of a data center is driven by energy.

My boss said, “Why do you want to work on facilities?” My contention was, it’s Carnegie Hall with 150 people per seat. A person is 100 watts. A rack would be 15 kilowatts. That’s 150 people in a seat. Imagine that. You have to deal with fluid flow and so on. We created the smart data center project. We build a data center with sensors and controls. We built the dynamic control systems for it. We were the first ones to do that.

We went on to build Eco pods. That started because of a conversation with a customer of ours. The customer had underground mines. My recommendation was to put data centers in containers and lower them into the ground. The region where they were, the ground was nine degrees Celsius. I said, “Let’s dump heat into the ground.” That didn’t happen. I wish it had, but the dot-com boom and bust happened at that moment. Otherwise that would have been one of the most secure places in the world.

Microsoft has launched a subscription service, Xbox Game Pass, with more than 100 games for $10 a month. And to help you store all of those games, Seagate is launching two new hard disk drives as extra storage for the Xbox One or the Xbox 360 game consoles.

The Seagate Game Drive for Xbox Game Pass Special Edition also has a special promotional deal. Seagate’s 2-terabyte hard drive sells for $90 and includes a one-month membership for Xbox Game Pass. The 4-terabyte hard drive sells for $130 and it comes with a two-month Xbox Game Pass membership.

Seagate said that gamers won’t have to worry about deleting a lot of games and waste a lot of time on re-downloads every time they decide to play an older game again. The drives plug directly into any USB port on the console. And with USB 3.0 connectivity, the experience with the external storage should be just like playing a game on the console’s internal drive. The console automatically detects the drive and walks a user through a setup process that takes a few minutes.

Gamers can take their favorite games and the hottest titles from the Xbox Game Pass catalog along with them—wherever. They can unplug the Seagate Game Drive and take an entire game library to a friend’s house.

Now that’s a lot of storage. Seagate is announcing today that the Seagate Game Drive Hub for Xbox has eight terabytes of storage for your games on the Xbox One game console.

The $200 hub has eight terabytes as well as a multi-purpose USB hub for players who have massive game libraries. The peripheral was designed in partnership with Microsoft’s Xbox team.

It goes along with Microsoft’s own strategy for getting a lot of games in the hands of gamers. Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass is a subscription that gives gamers access to 100 games for $10 a month.

The Seagate Game Drive Hub for Xbox works seamlessly with any console in the Xbox One family of devices (Xbox One, Xbox One S, and Project Scorpio). It has room for roughly 200 games (average game size is 35 gigabytes to 50 gigabytes) on 8 terabytes. Now you won’t have to delete your old games when you install new ones.

It has dual quick-access USB 3.0 ports. You can also connect other Xbox One accessories, such as steering wheels and even other Game Drives. The drive installs and connects automatically when you plug it in.