Seagate just announced that it will stop producing of 7200RPM 2.5 inch disk drives. The manufacturer’s high-end Momentous 7200.4, 7200.2, Momentus Thin 7200, and Momentus XT drives will no longer by the end of this year.

“We are going stop building our notebook 7200rpm hard disk drives at the end of 2013,” said David Burks, director of marketing and product management at Seagate Technology, during an interview with X-bit labs.

It’s not difficult to see why Seagate is pulling the plug on its7200RPM mobile lineup. Flash is only getting cheaper, and spinning disk – especially the expensive kind – can no long compete with SSDs. This is true in both the consumer space and enterprise.

“It’s our belief that over the next couple of years high performance and disk will really fall apart. Flash is used for high performance, disk is used for capacity,” Wikibon analyst Stu Miniman said on the NewsDesk show this morning (full video below).

“While it’s a little bit surprising that Seagate is dropping this product line, it’s really that dynamic that we’ve been seeing – is that for performance flash is really taking over,” Miniman says. “Seagate just thought it’s not a big part of their business, so they’re gonna drop it rather than continue.”

Seagate is doing more than just cutting costs. The company, one of the largest disk storage manufacturers in the world, is refreshing its portfolio to catch up with the times.

A little over a month ago the vendors invested $40 million in Virident, a flash startup that sells PCIe drives.  The capital is being used to fuel the development of hybrid solutions which will leverage Virident’s SSDs in order to increase the performance of Seagate’s traditional hardware. Wikibon’s David Floyer believes that the strategic partnership is a significant leap forward for both companies.

See Miniman’s full analysis below: