Industry insiders are talking about what move Seagate Technology, the world's largest and most successful disk drive maker, is going to make to get into a better position in the NAND flash market. Analyst Daniel Amir of financial advisory/asset management firm Lazard Ltd. put out a mergers-and-acquisition research note June 19 speculating that Seagate Technology may buy out Intel Corp.'s 49 percent interestworth anywhere from $1 billion to $2 billion — in its IM Flash Technologies flash memory joint venture with Micron Technology.

The IM Flash project has made news lately. This month, the IM Flash project started shipping a 34-nanometer, 32-gigabit NAND flash memory chip, the world's smallest and densest yet. Four months ago, the project announced a new high-speed NAND flash memory chip based on 8GB memory that they said has data speeds of up to five times faster than conventional NAND.