World hard drive leader Seagate is going to produce 2048GB hard drives next January in Singapore, a strategy to compete with flash memory chip, which has been regarded to take the place of hard drives, according to James M. Chirico, senior vice president and general manager Asia Operations of Seagate.

Samsung Electronics Co. holds that hard drive era is going to die out after the company unveiled 16 GB flash memory chips in September this year.

Flash memory chip lags far behind hard drive both in properties and capacity. An ordinary hard drive has a storage of hundred of GBs while flash memory only has several GBs, said general manager of Seagate China.

The manager also said that the two kinds of storage devices can be of complementary, flash memory is more suitable for handheld devices like MP3, while hard drive is more adequate for digital TV sets and mobile phones.

By People's Daily Online