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The Hard Business of Selling Hard Drive Platters
redfieldp writes: "This is a pretty interesting story about the 'last' HD manufacturer in the U.S., and reasons why the industry is ailing ..." There's quite a bit of interesting hard-drive history in here, too.
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Hard disk drive production capacity is far higher than demand, hence HDD manufacturers are having a harder time making a profit.
Why is this? Well three simple reasons spring to mind.
1. Current HDD capacities far exceed most users current demands.
OK, so you have more than one drive in your PC, but how many of the billion PCs sold have more than one? Servers do but they make up a very small (albeit highly profitable) segment of the HDD market. Most are installed in desktop PCs and, nowadays, most people don't use more than a fraction of the 20GB+ drives that come with a modern PC. Heck, even 5GB, the kind of capacity that was typical on an entry-level desktop three years ago is more than most users get through.
(Remember, not everyone is a MP3-fiend.)
2. We're buying fewer PCs.
Companies are buying fewer machines, as are private individuals.
Companies because the desktops that they've being buying lately need to be replaced less frequently than was previously the case (because the desktops they bought three years ago still run today's software comfortably), and because they are finding few new areas (ones that they haven't already covered) where a PC will help streamline operations. The current state of the global economy doesn't help either.
The same is essentially true for private individuals too. Anyone who wants a PC already likely has one, so why buy another one (especially in an uncertain economic climate) if the old one does the trick?
No new PC means no new HDD.
3. HDDs are now commodities.
Once something becomes ubiquitous and readily available, as HDDs have in the last five years, then it no longer demands a price premium. Fiercer competition means small profits, which means less reason to stay in the business, especially a business that ties up so much capital in the first place (in R&D and fabrication costs).
Examining these factors, especially the last one, it's not too hard to see why so many companies have exited the HDD business recently.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
60%? Maybe you should stop buying your parts from places where manufacturers dump their defective shit (aka PriceWatch).
If 60% of the drives in IBM's own machines failed, they'd be out of business right now.
from the article
" It hasn't been easy. On Monday, Dr. Bajorek's company will announce that it is successfully emerging from Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which the company entered in May 2001."
Honestly before commenting please read the article... Companies in Chapter 11 are not traded thus they have a 0.00 dollar share price..
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....
Works with this :
This indicates they don't do any manufacturing in the US? Thus are they a US manufacturer or a US owned Manufacturer ? and does this indicate there are non independant manufacturers in the US - for example IBM with US plants ? The word 'independant' is too important to be edited out of the slashdot story as it spins it in a new direction - there may be other manufacturers in the USA (i have no idea where to find out) but Komag is ONE of the last few independant ones (and i think US owned might be more valid).
This is more interesting :
So what manufacturing do they do in the US ? I suspect they have one single disk media plant and the platters are sold to OEM's for use in their drives. (they do - see Komags Website - they supply Seagate, maxtor and WD.
But in fact they don't seem to have a manufacturing plant in the us according to them - from their website
That indicates the plant that the NY Times is talking about is one of their R&D plants and not a production plant. Which it is as Komag lists San Jose and Santa Rosa as their 2 R&D plants - and for my mind R&D isn't manufacture...
So in fact are they a US manufacturer or a US owned manufacturer ? There is a difference to my mind as IBM are a US owned manufacturer.... In fact the article looks like a piece aimed at building the company's stock ahead of their relisting on the share market and not a piece about technology per se.
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....
If you go to Komag's web site, you'll see that they don't make drives, they make drive platters, which they sell to drive OEMs.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
How much does a 256M USB NVRAM "drive" cost today?
The main reason hard disc drives are still around and will be around for a while is because they're cheap. A 128MB USB "drive" from Sony that uses solid-state storage costs about $100... that is about 78 cents/MB. A low-end (7200rpm) 80GB desktop drive costs about $140, that is less than 0.2 cents/MB! Even 15K RPM SCSI drives cost only about 1.2 cents/MB. There are many emerging technologies that will let hard drives grow larger and faster and cheaper.
Maxtor does rock. Put simply, after that down period about six years ago, they got their sh*t together and started making a quality product, and they haven't given up. The price is right, the performance excellent (good to see Maxtor picked up Quantum's tendency to make fast-seeking IDE units.
The other really good product right now is Western Digital. They're IDE only now, unfortunately, but it take a lot of balls to stand up and recall drives from consumers, to fix a manufacturing flaw. They did it, and they earned my respect.
Samsung drives also have a really strong reputation.
In comparison we have IBM, whose last 15k SCSI unit doesn't even best Maxtor's latest 10k Atlas, and whose 7200rpm ATA models are limited by either the "Deathstar" rep or the limitations of a specificied Powered On Hours of Service specification that no one else seems to be using.
We also have Seagate, which makes some fantastic and unique products (the last 50-pin 7200rpm SCSI drive) in SCSI, and has IDE products that, frankly, suck dick. U-series drives have lousy reliability and performance that's matched by two-year old drives that are 1000rpm SLOWER. Even worse, WD's recent 5400rpm products come to wit 2% of Seagate's amazingly quite 7200rpm Barracuda IV in most benchmarks.
Most of my knowledge comes from either Storagereview.com or from Storageforum.net
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
HDs are currently the slowest thing in your computer, it is the ultimate bottleneck.
This means nothing. What about CD-Rom drives, DVD-Rom drivers, Zip drives, PCMCIA cards, Ethernet ports, USB devices, parallel ports, serial ports and floppy drives?
This is getting worse and worse each time, the performance jumps just are not present in this industry.
You are trolling big time, or you need a brain upgrade. Or perhaps simply you need to read the article. This industry's failure is that they improved way too fast. They increased the storage capacity by 100% every year! "Moore's Law? Yeah, you mean the thing we got past years ago?"
not until the manufacturers think of something creative in design
Yeah sure, those stupid morons are not creative. Every year, we tell them "There is no way you can put more data on this platter.", and every year these morons come up with new moronic ideas. Doh!
It took this long to get a 8meg cache drive, and we all know how cheap memory is.
Because of course a much bigger cache would mean a much better performance? I'm not so sure. Or else they would already have done it. You are playing a ridiculous game of "listen to me, morons". Except you're talking about very smart guys that know and take into account things you or I cannot even imagine.
There is serious lack of innovation in this field.
You seem to be a serious successful troll. Or a serious moron. You want speed? Buy several hard drives and do some RAID. You'll quickly notice that your PCI bus is very limited, though. We need 64 bits PCI cards at 66 MHz with integrated RAID controllers, and the motherboard companies are not even making them! Sheesh... There is a serious lack of innovation in the motherboard business.