Industry insiders reported yesterday that Seagate, the largest hard disk drive manufacturer, might be planning to take a big stake of a NAND manufacturer. Analyst Daniel Amir of financial advisory/asset management firm Lazard assumes that Seagate Technology may buy out Intel's 49% stake in IM Flash Technologies - a joint venture company between the microprocessor giant and Micron Technology. If true, Seagate will afford to pay as much as $2 billion and seal the deal. Such deal would help the company to go deep into the rapidly growing SSD and flash storage market. On the counter side, it would require Micron to agree to lose Intel as its partner. That's also one of the reasons why other flash industry watchers, are lead to believe that Seagate may be looking for a deal with flash chip makers Hynix and SanDisk instead.