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Amazing. A good oligopoly.
Read more at: Why we'll see even more disk drive choice | ZDNetIt's a paradox: we are down to 2 1/2 disk drive companies, but seeing more innovative disk drives then we have in years. Thin drives; hybrid drives; helium filled drives. Why?
Second source. For decades OEM buyers insisted on a second source for every product. This forced vendors to offer cookie-cutter products.
But now that disk drive manufacturing has been reduced to Seagate, Western Digital and Toshiba, what is the point of having a second source? PC vendors just have to trust that they'll have enough drives - and if they don't, well, too bad.
Thank the 2011 Thai floods for that new-found realism.
Amazing. A good oligopoly.
In my opinion hard drive manufacturers have just a few more years. Their is only so much they can do with a mechanical drive. SSD pricing and size will run them out of the hard drive business up to about a TB. I get this opinion because SSD prices are going down and size is growing larger. Hard drive manufactures will still have a market for very large storage drives for many years to come.
yeah, hard drive manufacturers are hard-pressed to not be put out of businness by SSD, so it's normal that they pull any trick they can asap.
Consumers like us are not the only market for HDD manufacturers. Larger commercial servers will still need large numbers of large capacity HDDs. It's going to be a long time before SSDs will be able to overcome the limited write cycles that aren't as much of a problem for HDDs not to mention cracking the cost effective size barrier (1-4TB for example). Just look at how much a 512GB SSD costs compared to a somewhat equivalent spinner. For storage only, the speed of an SSD just isn't all that necessary; certainly not enough to justify the price hit.
R&D is slow. Any action is planned multiple years in advance of a forecasted event.
Although you have a point on write cycles. Capacity is relatively easy to increase, but write-cycles are going to keep them from being employed in servers for a longish time even after they took over single-handedly the consumer market.
I don't think the man has done proper research. Naming just 3 manufacturers is not correct. With a 5 minute check I found those 9 - and I am sure there are more.
WD
Iomega
HGST
LaCie
Hitachi
ADATA
Fantom
Seagate
Toshiba
I think the guy talked about the companies that actually manufacture the drives, a lot of companies just sub-contract them to do stuff for them and just attach a sticker with their brand.
For PSUs and flash chips is the same, a ton of companies, a handfew of actual manufacturers.
But I admit I'm not a lot in the HDD businness...
WD: In original list
Iomega: does not sell internal drives
HGST: Part of Western Digital
LaCie: does not sell internal drives
Hitachi: as far as I can tell they do make their own drives. along with millions of other things
ADATA: does not sell internal drives
Fantom: does not sell internal drives
Seagate: In original list
Toshiba: In original list
So maybe only hitachi was not in the original list. Not really that noteworthy.
Well, I'll be using big mechanical drives for many years to come, because I refuse
categorically to store anything in the cloud.
I'd be buying them up if there was a danger they'd go out of use/production.
Wenda.