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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.
The drive market has been a commodity business for several years now. There's very little to distinguish the top offerings from the various vendors. IBM's exit from the drive arena recently was a reminder of this. A few years ago when I was part of a team designing a high-end RAID controller, it was the concensus of all the engineers that IBM made the best SCSI drives. They were dumbing billions into R&D and they still couldn't differenciate their offerings enough to make it profitable.
Here's waiting for fast solid state storage...
Jesus used to be my co-pilot, but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him.
You mean THIS link?
I think that IBM's exit is about more than the marketplace being competative. I think it's about the marketplace being dead. Think about it: how much did you spend on your first 256M HD? How much does a 256M USB NVRAM "drive" cost today?
My bet is that IBM is dumping this business because it's going the way of the tape drive. Yeah, still useful for LARGE amounts of data, but it looks like it should be easy to build NVRAM drives for damn cheap, and that have a MTBF that's longer than most of us will live.
How much would it cost to build a 20G NVRAM drive that performs 10x better than a platter?
As we all learned with the 60/75GXP fiasco. I personally think that had alot to do with IBM's exit from the HD business. However, its difficult to know if the drive your about to buy for less than normal street price is cheap because an OEM had too much inventory, or cheap because it made from cheap parts. I agree with you on the free trade on a balanced playing field would be best, but how do you get the other guy to change his rules, when he feels that you have cheated him for centuries? And its even tougher to deal with other countries if you don't show good faith in most dealings. The steel tariffs have hurt trade negotiations pretty significantly. Down with the sugar lobby, if nothing esle it keeps your prices for sugar about 50% higher than world prices. While the average /.er doesn't do enough sugar purchasing to notice, they might enjoy better pop. Soda switched to corn syrup about the time the quota's were put in place. Incedentally I once heard a sugar farmer complain that he never got a check from the government, so he obviously wasn't getting any subsidies.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Every hard disk on the market right now has some kind of distinguishing characteristic. Folks doing equipment purchasing may not be *aware* of the distinctions, but they are present nonetheless.
Want a high-performance 5400rpm ATA disk? Look at Western Digital's *AB-series drives. Quiet SCSI? Fujitsu has/had that market cornered. Performance at any cost? Seagate's X15-36LP.
I can't say any similar thing about true commodity items like RAM or floppy disk drives. --
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From what I understand, Maxtor's engineers had reverse engineered the problem and realized that IBM was recertifying old platters stored in hungary for the newer GMR head drives. Those old platters were designed to be used in 20 GB HDs not 80 GB, so basically the problem was the same one as using a hole punch in a Single Density floppy to make it Double density, formatting it might work, but it would be far more prone to errors and data loss.
It's too bad they tarnished their reputation, but on the plus side, IBM drives are now really cheap, and a simple torture test with spinright or any program designed to contsantly overwrite the unused space on a drive should be able to punish the drive into failure, for easy replacment should it be using defective platters.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Is it just me, or does it seem there's a direct correlation between your download speeds and your hard drive size?
Unless you create huge files (digital movies) there's only so many places a person can get data to fill their hard drive. Since most DVDs are not data, the only other medium is CDs, and 650megs barely makes a dent in even a small 10gig hard drive.
So the only other source for data is the internet. If you have a 56k modem, it would take a long time to download enough to fill even 1 gig. However, with broadband, it's full in a fraction of the time. Anyone with broadband at home would agree: they downloaded a lot more once they had broadband. Whether it's mp3s, movies, games or p0rn.
Before I had broadband I had a 20 gig hard drive and couldn't even fill half of it. After broadband I bought another 20 gig, then sold them for two 40gigs. Now I'm selling those for a 120 and 100gig. All because of broadband.
If I were hard drive manufactures I'd be damn sure to market to the broadband market, either form partnerships or sell directly to customers. Because without broadband no one needs anything larger than 10gigs.