Seagate owns some of the best drive technologies in the world – as does Hitachi GST. Seagate currently has a leg up on the entire industry with their near perfect implementation of perpendicular storage technology. Seagate owns the high capacity market in notebooks, and they are at the top of their game in desktop capacity at the moment. Lastly, Seagate has created great relationships with their customers and they employ some of the most talented people in the industry. The Canadian sales representative for Seagate is easily the best sales rep I have ever come across and I am not the only one to say this. I think the strengths that Seagate has is technology, people, and size.
Hitachi GST faced a number of challenges when they took over the hard drive business from IBM. They had to re-build credibility in the “Deskstar” (previously nicknamed “Deathstar” under IBM) line up. They succeeded and as a result the Deskstar is among the most stable hard drives that Voodoo uses at the moment. At the same time they were focusing on a number of areas, including Microdrives, Travelstar, and Ultrastar. They were killing everyone on the notebook side for a reasonable amount of time with the launch of their ever popular Travelstar 7200 RPM series.
The Hitachi Travelstar was the drive of choice in our notebooks; that until their competition caught up and surpassed them in capacity. Unfortunately for Hitachi, their marketing team was on the ball with the “get perpendicular” message, but for some reason they missed the mark on the launch. In the meantime Hitachi was still building strong relationships with the enthusiast community. In fact Hitachi recently released a 500 gigabyte drive with some technology that enhances stability, making it perfect for RAIDs.
Hitachi has the makings of being a major leader in storage if they could just get everyone in their company on the same path. Hitachi needs to take a page out of Western Digital’s handbook and do something completely out of the box. I think the strengths that Hitachi have are technology, and an inherent desire to be the best. They do not need to “get perpendicular” just yet in order to win the enthusiast market over.
Western Digital has one thing over Seagate and Hitachi that neither company has been able to take away. Western Digital is the perceived performance champion within the enthusiast market. No matter what anyone thinks Western Digital is growing because of their performance leadership in the enthusiast space – and NOT because they make a good product and a good price. Mark my words; their growth can be directly attributed to the success of the Western Digital Raptor series – even though it accounts for a small amount of their sales. Success to me means reviews, great performance, and great customer love – ultimately all of these are a cause and sales is attributed to the “halo effect” on their entire product line. When people go around saying “I love my Western Digital Raptor” it displays a level of evangelism that many companies envy.
It has been proven over and over again in many industries – if you win the race on Sunday you’ll sell more cars on Monday. Western Digital Raptor is a killer drive, and it proves this that this concept of winning races applies to even the storage business.
Now if Hitachi and Seagate would just wake up and realize that they should build a 15,000 RPM SATA drive as soon as possible they might be able to gain traction in a market that they need to own.
I wrote an article for CPU magazine on the hard drive space and why I believe storage is king this year leading into next. This will lead into a series of articles on storage, including another possible merger/acquisition that I see taking place in the future.
Seagate, Hitachi, and Western Digital best keep one eye open for Samsung - a company who has resources to the moon and a clear mission that they plan to follow.
People view storage as the most boring part of the PC business; I see storage as king in 2007. The article for CPU will be in their next issue – make sure you pick up a subscription.
22 blogger comments:
Rahul,
Nice blog on HD's. I completely agree with you about 2007 being the year of HD's, and can't wait to see what new products Seagate, Hitachi, WD, and Samsung bring to the table. Competition is good for conusmers, after all. Anyway, I'm wondering on your thoughts about the future of storage. Do you think that solid state will overtake hard drives in the near future? If so, how soon?
Just curious, you guys being OEMs, what percentage of drives that you guys use in your system fail?
Is there one brand that fails more than others?
Lastly, seems to me that eSATA will be the next big thing in the storage area, since USB 2 & 1394 based drives are dead slow compared to normal IDE & SATA connected drives.
Hopefully, soon, you guys will be able to offer systems with eSATA interfaces.
I think you have it totally right. Western Digital sells drives based on the fact that the Raptor series exists. I have a Seagate 160GB, which I love and is quiet and awesome, and a WD 160GB, which is loud and annoying. I would really like to see faster access to the info on your drive without paying insane prices for it, like the Raptor series.
I've gotta agree with you on this one Rahul. Working with the ever increasing need for storage at my work, hard drives and storage is always one of our biggest challenges. As our databases grow by gigabytes every year, our biggest challenge is maintaining enough space and speed.
We use a Xiotech SAN in our environment, and Xiotech is partially owned by Seagate actually. They not only make a great product in terms of manageability and scalability, but this SAN box is FAST. Loaded up with 146GB 15k RPM Cheetahs all in RAID 10, it costs a pretty penny but it works out great. I would love to see a consumer version of a SAN on a desktop solution. Something integrated into motherboards and HDDs that will allow the use of hotspares and redundancy.
As boring as storage may be, it is one of the more difficult things to manage when most people try to keep storage sizes static whereas businesses need to keep them dynamic and grow as the business grows. Maybe 2007 will be the year where enterprise level storage options will be available to home users...
what are views on the upcoming bluray from sony. not much has been said about possible drives but they are pushing high capacity to a new level for discs.
I'm care more about the DRM issues around blu-ray then anything else at the time.
I care more about the DRM issues around blu-ray then the capacity.
Holo storage is what I'm more interested in
urban said...
Rahul,
Nice blog on HD's. I completely agree with you about 2007 being the year of HD's, and can't wait to see what new products Seagate, Hitachi, WD, and Samsung bring to the table.
Yeah, I'm at the edge of my seat...
Anyway, I'm wondering on your thoughts about the future of storage. Do you think that solid state will overtake hard drives in the near future? If so, how soon?
Certainly not the near future, but I think solid state will suppliment disk storage, no doubt about that. Only the smart will figure out how to make them co-exist.
Tuesday, March 28, 2006 1:44:56 PM
Anonymous said...
Just curious, you guys being OEMs, what percentage of drives that you guys use in your system fail?
It depends on how they're installed. Under RAID the drives get stressed more than not. It also depends on the system cooling, in our case we're okay there.
Is there one brand that fails more than others?
Not really, at least not lately. Somtimes we'll run into a bad model but it's very rare, and lately we haven't seen anything like it.
Lastly, seems to me that eSATA will be the next big thing in the storage area, since USB 2 & 1394 based drives are dead slow compared to normal IDE & SATA connected drives.
Yes, you can actually buy systems now with external SATA connectors.
Hopefully, soon, you guys will be able to offer systems with eSATA interfaces.
Hopefully more drive manufacturers will read this and see what people are looking for. Judging by where the traffic is coming from I'd say we're covered.
Tuesday, March 28, 2006 1:54:49 PM
Stan / Parker
Stan / Parker said...
I think you have it totally right. Western Digital sells drives based on the fact that the Raptor series exists. I have a Seagate 160GB, which I love and is quiet and awesome, and a WD 160GB, which is loud and annoying. I would really like to see faster access to the info on your drive without paying insane prices for it, like the Raptor series.
Well, I don't mind the insane prices of the Raptor. I also like Western Digitals implementation of "RAID Edition". Those guys are totally listening to their customers. Hitachi implemented something similar to their 500 gig, it's currently among my favorite drives.
Tuesday, March 28, 2006 3:31:14 PM
chowbow said...
I've gotta agree with you on this one Rahul.
Only this one Chow?
Working with the ever increasing need for storage at my work, hard drives and storage is always one of our biggest challenges. As our databases grow by gigabytes every year, our biggest challenge is maintaining enough space and speed.
Yeah I hear you there man.
We use a Xiotech SAN in our environment, and Xiotech is partially owned by Seagate actually. They not only make a great product in terms of manageability and scalability, but this SAN box is FAST. Loaded up with 146GB 15k RPM Cheetahs all in RAID 10, it costs a pretty penny but it works out great.
Oh, we love the Cheetah here, no doubt.
I would love to see a consumer version of a SAN on a desktop solution. Something integrated into motherboards and HDDs that will allow the use of hotspares and redundancy.
Agreed, I think the products that are currently coming out are overpriced (SAN).
As boring as storage may be, it is one of the more difficult things to manage when most people try to keep storage sizes static whereas businesses need to keep them dynamic and grow as the business grows. Maybe 2007 will be the year where enterprise level storage options will be available to home users...
Well, it should be. Seeing as Media Center has huge storage demands I think the drive guys see this coming.
Tuesday, March 28, 2006 5:07:49 PM
moe said...
what are views on the upcoming bluray from sony. not much has been said about possible drives but they are pushing high capacity to a new level for discs.
I don't get as excited about optical storage as I do drive storage. I like the idea of being able to store multiple movies - or even much higher quality movies on a DVD. The DRM issues bug me.
Tuesday, March 28, 2006 5:40:47 PM
Anonymous said...
I'm care more about the DRM issues around blu-ray then anything else at the time.
Yeah, same
Tuesday, March 28, 2006 7:56:52 PM
Anonymous said...
Holo storage is what I'm more interested in
Yeah I just noticed a company put out an announcement yesterday about Holo storage, it looks interesting.
Yhea and with Robinson Technology
ther will be fight over the Harddrive industry as well
like the cat figts with ATI en NVIDIA arent fun enough :-)
rahul you are right , samsung is the next to watch . i own a samsung harddrive and they work prefectly slient ..
but anyway ,rumorus say samsung may even got the money for western digital
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=30619
I have to agree. Too much emphasis is put on more and more storage, not enough on performance. Which is one of the reasons the Raptor series took off so well. Speed, efficiency without the bloat. Not everybody needs 500GB of storage in a single harddrive, and all that space doesn't help a bit if the computer takes three minutes from POST to finish the boot.
Personally, I think the idea of having a performance drive and a storage drive makes the most sense longterm. I myself use two 74GB Raptors with a spare storage drive, and I've still never come close to capacity on the main drives (let along the storage).
I'm eager to see how the new NAND drives work for laptops in a performance/price ratio. My laptop has a battery life of 30 minutes (at most), and increasing that any way I can would be a huge boon.
Increasing data density at the same RPM DOES increase data throughput. Therefore moving to perpendicular recording is pushing the envelope in two directions at the same time. Higher capacity AND higher throughput.
Consider the following scenarios with the same data i/o:
1./ Same drive density, double the RPM
2./ Double drive density, same RPM
Any intelligent life-form would go for 2. Why?
>> Quieter
>> Less power
>> Cooler
>> More reliable (error rates and wear are a factor of RPM squared, ie. half speed = 4 times as reliable. Actually, this relationship may be of higher order, like RPM cubed, i.e. 8 times. Anyone got the know-how on this one?)
***************************************
Why not try a bit of original thinking?
***************************************
What HDD manufacturers need to do it invest in a HDD that is MORE EXPENSIVE to produce.
What? OMG. That doesn't look right. Spend more on production? No. No.
But yes, this is what should be implemented:
1./ Multiple head per platter. What does this mean? Well today, HDD's have one arm with one read/write head on it, per platter. Try taking an old HDD apart and have a look.
Every time you want to read/write to the drive, the arm has to move to the right location (cylinder) and wait until the right sector is under the head.
What is needed is to have multiple read/write heads, spanning more than one cylinder on a HDD. This way, the HDD can rip multiple data tracks at once, store the data in local CACHE, and provide the data as required to the OS.
2./ Implement RAID WITHIN the HDD. Yes, in most 5.25inch drives there are multiple platters. But does the firmware of the HDD use these platters simultaneously for better performance? No. The arms that are fixed together chould read/write in blocks striping across all platters simultaneously, but do not.
Why isn't this being implemented?
Internally, HDD's are designed to work reading/writing serially. Not in parallel. The firmware, wiring, and processing power of the HDD would have to be much more sophisticated than it is today.
The CACHE size would also need to larger. Very much larger.
If memory serves me well, on a large, high density HDD, the amount of data on each cylinder is approx 50MB. With multiple heads reading/writing in parallel, you would probably need 50MB CACHE per head. 4 Heads in parallel, 200MB CACHE to be truly effective and give you the 4x speed up.
Perhaps this CACHE could be held on a controller card. That would help. With a couple of slots to accomodate your old, spare DDR sticks.
Nonetheless, these two issues would make HDDs MORE EXPENSIVE for the same capacity than current drives. And guess what? There aren't enough enthusiasts out there that would buy one of these at the incremental cost.
(c) Any new concepts herein are copyright the lemonadesoda corporation 2006. Thank you.
Lol. But right on. On the other hand though, you could actually have a third option -- decrease the seek times by increasing the speed of the read heads.
I've gotta agree with you on this one Rahul.
Only this one Chow?
Nah, just bad wording on my part I guess. ;)
I think Hitachi or Samsung, will buy Western Digital this year.
At Wednesday, March 29, 2006 4:15:00 AM, Anonymous said...
rahul you are right , samsung is the next to watch . i own a samsung harddrive and they work prefectly slient ..
Yes, but more important, they have a ton of money and they want to be #2 by the end of 2007.
but anyway ,rumorus say samsung may even got the money for western digital http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=30619
Gee, I wonder where Charlie got that idea from.
At Wednesday, March 29, 2006 7:12:09 AM, Anonymous said...
I have to agree. Too much emphasis is put on more and more storage, not enough on performance. Which is one of the reasons the Raptor series took off so well. Speed, efficiency without the bloat.
Even though you can get better performance with increased density you still cannot beat the 10k/15k drives.
Not everybody needs 500GB of storage in a single harddrive, and all that space doesn't help a bit if the computer takes three minutes from POST to finish the boot.
Agreed.
Personally, I think the idea of having a performance drive and a storage drive makes the most sense longterm. I myself use two 74GB Raptors with a spare storage drive, and I've still never come close to capacity on the main drives (let along the storage).
What brand is your storage drive?
I'm eager to see how the new NAND drives work for laptops in a performance/price ratio. My laptop has a battery life of 30 minutes (at most), and increasing that any way I can would be a huge boon.
Yeah, although drives play an important role in battery life, screen,video,cpu,platform affect it much more.
At Wednesday, March 29, 2006 7:13:14 AM, Anonymous said...
Increasing data density at the same RPM DOES increase data throughput.
Yes, it does.
Therefore moving to perpendicular recording is pushing the envelope in two directions at the same time. Higher capacity AND higher throughput.
Sorry, but I don't buy that arguement. If you aren't winning the race you are only pusing the capacity envelope.
Consider the following scenarios with the same data i/o:
1./ Same drive density, double the RPM
2./ Double drive density, same RPM
Any intelligent life-form would go for 2. Why?
Or 3. Doube drive density, higher RPM.
or 4. (which is what I'm talking about in the first place) Same drive density, higher RPM.
>> Quieter
The Raptors aren't that noisy in a well built chassis.
>> Less power
Who cares, it's a desktop. Our customers generally don't care about the power.
>> Cooler
If build in a proper chassis the cooler factor isn't a factor. In a tight media center I can see the benefit of a cooler running drive.
>> More reliable (error rates and wear are a factor of RPM squared, ie. half speed = 4 times as reliable. Actually, this relationship may be of higher order, like RPM cubed, i.e. 8 times. Anyone got the know-how on this one?)
Yeah, I can see reliability being a factor although I also believe that the proof is in the installations. I rarely see Raptor drives fail more than others - they all seem to have the same failure rate. Although Hitachi's new 500 gig seems to be solid as a rock.
What HDD manufacturers need to do it invest in a HDD that is MORE EXPENSIVE to produce.
I don't care if they're more expensive to produce. Don't forget, we are dealing with customers who don't mind paying extra for the best performance.
What? OMG. That doesn't look right. Spend more on production? No. No.
Yes, and charge more for it.
What is needed is to have multiple read/write heads, spanning more than one cylinder on a HDD. This way, the HDD can rip multiple data tracks at once, store the data in local CACHE, and provide the data as required to the OS.
Sure, drive manufacturers are already working on this.
Implement RAID WITHIN the HDD. Yes, in most 5.25inch drives there are multiple platters. But does the firmware of the HDD use these platters simultaneously for better performance? No. The arms that are fixed together chould read/write in blocks striping across all platters simultaneously, but do not.
Great concept!! I love it. This might require dual interfaces to be effective though.
The CACHE size would also need to larger. Very much larger.
Increasing the cache now would increase performance on current architecture - although there are diminishing returns.
Perhaps this CACHE could be held on a controller card. That would help. With a couple of slots to accomodate your old, spare DDR sticks.
Either that or make the drives include a built-in upgradable cache controller. Again this would increase production costs and drive costs.
Nonetheless, these two issues would make HDDs MORE EXPENSIVE for the same capacity than current drives. And guess what? There aren't enough enthusiasts out there that would buy one of these at the incremental cost.
Western Digital seems to think there are.
(c) Any new concepts herein are copyright the lemonadesoda corporation 2006. Thank you.
You have some great ideas, I hope others reading this will take them into consideration.
At Wednesday, March 29, 2006 7:13:42 AM, Anonymous said...
Lol. But right on. On the other hand though, you could actually have a third option -- decrease the seek times by increasing the speed of the read heads.
exactly what I said.
At Wednesday, March 29, 2006 9:20:05 AM, Anonymous said...
I think Hitachi or Samsung, will buy Western Digital this year.
I think you should read my CPU Mag article too.
Post a Comment
My current Seagate drive, an ST3200822A is louder and performs poorly in comparison to my Western Digital (WD800JB) that admitedly does have an additional 6MB cache.
It's a replacement drive after my first ST3200822A failed. I find the drive noisy when in use and due to the implementation of a technology called STR it's also noisy when not in use. The noise when idle emulates a train passing. STR cannot be disabled and there's no detailed explanation of how having it enabled is beneficial to begin with.
Western Digital innovates across the board and do not focus all their energy into one area.
If I had to buy a drive tomorrow, it would be a Western Digital drive.
personally, i will just get Seagate for its 5 years warranty
WD is great price, Samsung is cheaper, known for its quiet operation,
Agreed on the Raptor, but the price of the 36gb yet to reduce to what i think is affordable, maybe my next drive would be a raptor, i hope,
Samsung had a product that would have 128mb of cache? hard drive? 32gb solid state drive? they are giant, plenty of memory too, i am nit such about their supply though,
5 years warranty really good strategic, don't you agree?
I personally have only used the Seagate drives (7200.7 and 7200.9) recently because of the 5 year warranty. We've probably shipped 75 or so of them out, and only had one come back yet. That's a great record compared to the other drives we've replaced from other companies.
Although you claim there is no drive that fails more often that another, I must dissagree. Maxtor drives seem to me to have the highest failure rate of any company in the 40-80GB range, especially their short form factor drives.
One question, do you think that Dell and the likes get specially made drives from their suppliers? I know in one case I attempted to RMA a drive from a Dell and was told the warranty was different for those drives, I think it was an IBM.
Seagate was the only another name for harddisk for me for several years...but things have changed...their quality went down drastically in the last several years...I lost the trust coz of several frequent problems and data loss with SG. If things have improved, yeah...I would like to have a peep...and yeah...I love the 5 yr guaranty..
While storage will undoubtedly need to evolve and soon, I still think a wholesale revolution is a ways off yet. I agree it's needed and wanted; HDD tech hasn't really fundamentally changed in decades and it's overdue.
However, I am more interested to see how the hybrid drives pan out in the near future. MS tells me that Vista will take great advantage of the combo flash/HDDs but I have yet to get any sample drives to evaluate it.
That technology appeals to me more immediately. Speed on the desktop side and speed and power on the notebook front should all benefit. Rumor has it boot times can be slashed dramatically and on a notebook the boot is faster and consumes a fraction of the power.
If anyone gets to test a hybrid drive, let us all know how it goes? Samsung has reportedly made samples but I haven't seen one yet.
Glen.
"Seagate was the only another name for harddisk for me for several years...but things have changed...their quality went down drastically in the last several years"
Honestly, Seagate was making some pretty terrible drives back in the Seashield days, but with the 7200.7 and .9 series drives, quality has surpassed all of my expectations.
"If anyone gets to test a hybrid drive, let us all know how it goes?"
While not quite hybrid hard drive level, Vista's betas do have support for a USB-based Flash device to be used to speed up hard drive operations. I have played with a 1gb SD card, and needless to say, I honestly could not tell the difference with it in or not. Boots never even touched the drive until well into Explorer's loading. Maybe this tech is still half-baked in Vista 5308, and maybe they are hoping for flash devices like Samsung's new NAND that's capable of 100+ mb/s transfers, but current tech is not even close to impressive.
Post a Comment