New
#1
Amazing. A good oligopoly.
Why we'll see even more disk drive choice
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New #2
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.
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New #3
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.
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New #4
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.
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New #5
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.
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New #6
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
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New #7
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...
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New #8
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.
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New #9
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.
Why we'll see even more disk drive choice
Posted: 05 Jun 2013
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.
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