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.

Comments

Too bad

[jred]

/. screwed the link, and now everyone is posting a proper link. I just wish they had posted the circumvented link instead of the reg. required one...

Re:Too bad

[Eversor]

username: slashd0t
password: slashd0t
works

jesus did I really need to say it?

[carpe_noctem]

This is a pretty interesting story about http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/01/technology/01KOM A.html>the 'last' HD manufacturer in the U.S., and reasons why the industry is ailing ...

double check those URLs and HTML tags!

I tell you, nobody takes any pride in their work anymore :/

Commodity business

[DeafDumbBlind]

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...

Circumvented One

[Disevidence]

Circumvention

heh

[hatter3bdev]

The problem is they just work too well and nobody pays any attention.

I Guess we know why windows is so popular then :-)

My speculation...

[Ziviyr]

there has been industry speculation that Millipede is the secret advantage that led I.B.M. to decide to sell its disk-drive business to Hitachi.

I speculate it might have been due to IBM's hideous failure to manufacturing stable drives that cause them to sell out. 60% failure rate here, and thats not the floor of it!

US Manufacturing

[Citizen of Earth]

'last' HD manufacturer in the U.S., and reasons why the industry is ailing

Because American workers are over-paid and the "strong" US dollar makes imports cheaper?

Re:US Manufacturing

[OneFix]

I wish this were the case, but it is generally not that American workers are over-paid, but the workers in other countries are under-paid (read exploited).

Just look at what happens...when was the last time you heard about the cheap imports from France...how about the UK...what about Germany...or Canada...or even Japan (most of the cheap electronics are made in countries like Korea and Hong Kong).

No...the truth is, it's just cheaper to buy a worker in developing/under-developed countries.

But, in the long run, it helps drive down the cost of an American worker which makes every country's workers suffer.

...Now, don't get me wrong, there are overpaid American workers, but there are also overpaid workers in most every industry and in most every developed country.

Re:US Manufacturing

[Citizen of Earth]

I wish this were the case, but it is generally not that American workers are over-paid, but the workers in other countries are under-paid (read exploited).

The economics of this sort of thing are all relative. If I lived in a third-world country and made one-tenth of my present salary, effectively I would be wealthy beyond all belief. Yeah, I'd sure be exploited!

Just look at what happens...when was the last time you heard about the cheap imports from France...how about the UK...what about Germany...or Canada

Cheap is a relative term, but costs are significantly lower for manufacturers in Canada, for instance. That is why so many American cars are made in Canada. Canadian workers are paid relatively less (or, as I said before, American workers are over-paid), and the 'artifically' low currency-exchange rate makes importing much more sensible than manufacturing in the US. You also get an educated and skilled workforce as good as or better than in the US. OTOH, the US is a big market with a big appetite for imports. Common business sense says to move cost centers (manufacturing/production) to Canada (or various other countries) and profit centers (sales) to America.

No...the truth is, it's just cheaper to buy a worker in developing/under-developed countries.

Well yeah. In a system of global economics, each country has different circumstances and can offer different comparative advantages. Third-world countries sometimes have raw natural resources to trade, but they always have cheap labour to offer.

But really, one needs to question the notion that these workers are 'exploited', given that the 'exploitation' happens on a voluntary basis. The only conclusion is that the 'exploitation' (by first-world standards) is significantly better than the alternative, presumably subsistance farming, begging, or starving to death. The anti-globalization protesters never seem to grapple with this issue. [A prosperous nation doesn't just appear overnight, and international welfare will never create one. Prosperity is the result of a long bootstrapping process that only possible under a responsible government.]

But, in the long run, it helps drive down the cost of an American worker which makes every country's workers suffer.

Bullshit. In the long run, the economics balance out to where workers are compensated in proportion to their skills and relative worth. Everybody wins in this circumstance. Perhaps American workers will ultimately stop being over-paid, but the rest of the world won't suffer because of this. With greater economic efficiency, the global standard of living increases.

but there are also overpaid workers in most every industry and in most every developed country

That's pretty much a tautology. For various political and fixed forces, some workers are paid more than they are worth, because the free market has been retarded from functioning properly.

Re:US Manufacturing

[OneFix]

The economics of this sort of thing are all relative. If I lived in a third-world country and made one-tenth of my present salary, effectively I would be wealthy beyond all belief. Yeah, I'd sure be exploited!

Of course the statement in your origonal post seemed to overlook this fact by just saying that American workers are over-paid...what you should have said is that American workers are paid more than those working in under-developed/developing nations. Which is why the average American worker has a higher standard of living than say someone living in Mexico or Korea. And I would agree with that, but I hardly think that justifies the origonal statement.

Bullshit. In the long run, the economics balance out to where workers are compensated in proportion to their skills and relative worth. Everybody wins in this circumstance. Perhaps American workers will ultimately stop being over-paid, but the rest of the world won't suffer because of this. With greater economic efficiency, the global standard of living increases.

Wrong...history has proven that the gap between the haves (those living in developed countries) and the have-nots (those living in under-developed/developing countries) becomes larger over time. Your assumption is that as soon as american workers are willing to accept a lower salary, then that will increase the salary of someone working in an under-developed/developing country...and that just isn't true. When the cost of an american worker goes down, then the cost of a similar worker in another country has to go down as well...it doesn't as you say "balance out". As countries become more prosperous, then their workers get paid more, and then eventually their workers lose jobs to ppl in another developing country...

Consumers will never pay more for the same exact product (except in certain circumstances like memory where supply is limited). This is the problem with this viewpoint...as soon as an "exploited" worker's salary starts to go up, the company that once prefered to exploit the workers in this once poor country will find a new country to exploit (probably somewhere like Afganistan)...

The flaw in this thinking is that companies that move production to countries where their workers are willing to work for lower pay will somehow stay there because their workers either have a higher education (how does that work...poor workers in developing countries are somehow given better opportunities)??? Or are making a better product...

I don't know about you, but most of the products I've seen from developing nations are of poorer quality than those from developed nations (Just ask someone if they'ld prefer to drive a Kia or a Toyota)...

It's simple, exploited workers in developing nations are kept on a short leash and if they demand more or become "difficult", the same company that didn't hesitate to give them a lower pay/less benifits/etc will move to another location where the workers are not as "problematic"...

Like it or not, companies that do this have no loyalty to their employees...

Re:US Manufacturing

[Citizen of Earth]

Of course the statement in your origonal post seemed to overlook this fact by just saying that American workers are over-paid...

American workers on average, compared to all other workers in the world, including the industrialized nations, are paid disportionality high wages for the value of the work that they do. I think that "over-paid" is a pretty good summary of this situation.

what you should have said is that American workers are paid more than those working in under-developed/developing nations.

And industrialized nations.

Which is why the average American worker has a higher standard of living than say someone living in Mexico or Korea.

South Koreans have a surprisingly high standard of living, almost on par with industrialized nations ($16K+ per capita purchasing-power parity). North Korea is pretty much a poster child of Communistic poverty. Mexico has big problems with government corruption and low education. An interesting related stat is that 80% of Canadians have a higher standard of living than 80% of Americans (except for the richest quintile). Don't delude yourself that America is the end-all and be-all of living standards or that it is immune from the laws of economics. Farmer subsidies, tarrifs, etc., serve to lower your standard of living.

Your assumption is that as soon as american workers are willing to accept a lower salary, then that will increase the salary of someone working in an under-developed/developing country...and that just isn't true.

You're confusing cause and effect. Basically, I am saying that freer trade will cause American wages to go down, because they are disportionately high w.r.t. making products elsewhere for cheaper.

Salaries in developing countries will increase as their labour forces acquire more skills and improved infrastructure for more production capability. As they are able to do more work, such as with India and software development, they will get more work and Americans will need to become more competitive (or reduce wages). Competition is a great equalizer.

In the bigger picture, economics is not a zero-sum game. It's one of few processes in which everyone can win.

When the cost of an american worker goes down, then the cost of a similar worker in another country has to go down as well...it doesn't as you say "balance out".

I don't see why. All that matters is that the foreign worker be competitive against the American worker. He could even be paid more if his productivity was higher. The Japanese steel industry, for example, is about twice as productive per worker than the American steel industry. This is mostly the result of investment in infrastructure, which I guess just isn't a sexy thing to do in America. I don't know what their wages are like.

As countries become more prosperous, then their workers get paid more, and then eventually their workers lose jobs to ppl in another developing country...

Well yeah, as developing countries become more competitive, workers in more-developed countries will need to justify their wages. Invariably, low-skill/low-pay jobs will migrate to the less developed nations, since they can supply low-skilled labour cheaper.

But, these developing nations that loose low-skill jobs to less developed nations will also acquire the critical mass of education, skills, and infrastructure to go to the "next level" and do more-complicated work, like build cars, microchips, hard drives, and televisions. Since their workers will presumably have (and require) lower wages than Americans, jobs of manufacturing hard drives, etc., will migrate away from America to "middle-tier" nations. How many television manufactures are in the US? Zero. How many hard drive makers? When IBM finishes pulling the plug, zero. America is not competitive at doing these things.

OTOH, greater global economic efficiency means that you can buy more stuff for cheaper. If you were to suffer a 10% loss in wages but get a 20% increase in purchasing power, you've come out ahead. Your standard of living will have increased.

Consumers will never pay more for the same exact product (except in certain circumstances like memory where supply is limited). This is the problem with this viewpoint...as soon as an "exploited" worker's salary starts to go up, the company that once prefered to exploit the workers in this once poor country will find a new country to exploit (probably somewhere like Afganistan)...

You say that as if there were something wrong with it. Perhaps you're a protectionist? Also, it takes a large amount of infrastructure and a fair amount of labour skill to make memory chips, so Afghanistan won't be very competitive in that market for a long time.

I don't know about you, but most of the products I've seen from developing nations are of poorer quality than those from developed nations (Just ask someone if they'ld prefer to drive a Kia or a Toyota)...

An automobile is another complex commodity. Developing nations have a way to go before being truly competitive in that market. Textiles and farming, OTOH, for example, require significantly fewer skills. Ultimately, it's the consumer who decides what is the best product at the best price. If Kias suck, then don't buy them.

Like it or not, companies that do this have no loyalty to their employees...

Nor should they. Why should anyone pay more than they need to, including employers?

Assuming that you're an American worker, I think that you've been far too pampered for far too long. The rest of the world is becoming more competitive every day. You will need to either become more productive or your wages will decrease.

Re:US Manufacturing

[Citizen of Earth]

I am a former employee of Western Digital. When the factory was moved from Singapore to Malaysia, the primary reason given was the tax incentive. Malaysia was giving us several years of tax-free operation in exchange for moving into their country.

Interesting. Government subsidies interfere with a free market. Most trade agreements seek to reduce subsidies, though don't tell that to George W. and the farmland states that voted for him.

Re:US Manufacturing

[Citizen of Earth]

The Japanese steel industry, for example, is about twice as productive per worker than the American steel industry. This is mostly the result of investment in infrastructure, which I guess just isn't a sexy thing to do in America.

Actually, one might speculate that during the same period of time, Americans were busy pouring their investment dollars into dot-coms rather than hard infrastructure.

Re:US Manufacturing

[Citizen of Earth]

I don't know about you, but most of the products I've seen from developing nations are of poorer quality than those from developed nations (Just ask someone if they'ld prefer to drive a Kia or a Toyota)...

The first generation of Japanese automobiles, which arrived in America in the 1970s, also sucked.

Re:US Manufacturing

[Citizen of Earth]

So you are only half right.

There are probably a dozen significant factors and neither of us have given exhaustive lists. But I think that by not mentioning it you are underrating the undervalued-by-25% currency-exchange rate of the Canadian dollar.

Re:US Manufacturing

[markmoss]

The West European nations all have far higher minimum wages without the ghettos we have, so that kinda blows a hole in your argument, doesn't it?

They've also got far higher unemployment, youth gangs, and soaring crime rates that really do endanger the middle class (vs. America where the gangbangers stay in their own neighborhoods and mostly shoot each other). I'm not fond of the results of the American "system", but if things seem to be better in Europe, it's just because their reporters don't play up the problems as much.

Most of the unemployed (and virtually unemployable) young Euro criminals are "white", because most of their population is, but where they have "colored" immigrants or guestworkers (Turks, Pakistanis, etc.) they have ghettos. I suspect that some of these are far worse than any American ghetto, and I'm not sure if white English working-class neighborhoods are much better than American ghettos by now - except that their gangbangers can walk over too a better neighborhood without drawing too much attention and find someone actually worth mugging...

Also, Europe has a lot more blatant racist violence - German skinheads burning Turks in their apartment houses, British skinheads hunting for "Pakis", christians and moslems both attacking jews... Sure we have such incidents in the USA - and every single one makes the news coast to coast, causing a reaction strong enough to scare the other racists, homophobes, and other sorts of creeps into staying home for a while. Seems like the Euro authorities try to sweep their incidents under the carpet.

Re:US Manufacturing

[markmoss]

Most of the steel infrastructure in Japan is much, much older than the dot-com era. But for obvious reasons it had to be totally rebuilt after WWII (much of this paid for by the same American taxpayers who had paid to demolish it in the first place), while the American steel industry is still running many pre-WWII plants. And I suspect that the Japanese have also replaced equipment faster since the war - there hasn't been much interest in this country in basic industries, or in anything with 20 year payoffs. And it might actually make quite good sense that the US isn't investing in large steel plants - it may be far cheaper to buy it from foreigners than to make it here.

By the way, one sort of steelmaking thrives in modern America - small mills producing high quality steels to order. These plants are modern. They don't make steel from ore, but purchase what they can't get by recycling. They get a fairly high price per pound, but quality and quick delivery make it worthwhile for many uses. It's no surprise that such a plant makes fewer tons per man-hour than a gigantic modern plant, which can only make a few kinds of product.

Re:US Manufacturing

[markmoss]

The economics of this sort of thing are all relative. If I lived in a third-world country and made one-tenth of my present salary, effectively I would be wealthy beyond all belief. Yeah, I'd sure be exploited!

I was in Malaysia a year ago. (This is one of the relatively successful third-world countries.) Of the half-dozen engineers I dealt with, only the chief engineer owned a car. None of them could afford to marry before 30. We were in a rural region, but the air was polluted enough to affect my sinuses - in particular, around meal-time the air fills up with smoke from all the cookfires. (I didn't ask what kind of solid fuel they were burning...)

Re:US Manufacturing

[Citizen of Earth]

And it might actually make quite good sense that the US isn't investing in large steel plants - it may be far cheaper to buy it from foreigners than to make it here.

This must be why George W. as erected the latest round of tariffs on imported steel. No, wait a second...

Re:US Manufacturing

[OneFix]

As a general rule, the first generation of any product sucks. The Japanese were just beginning to get into the market. Most of these manufacturers do not have that problem. Most are somehow related to companies that have been in the business for years...like it or not, companies like IBM have no excuse for making a bad product.

Re:US Manufacturing

[OneFix]

The dollar derives its value from the fact that all Oil consumers MUST pay in dollars

Wrong, The dollar remains high valued because the US is where all of the "money" is...it's the same reason why english is the international language of commerce. It's the whole golden rule concept...those who hold the gold make the rules...

Incidentally, a significant amount of cheap electonics IS made in Europe. (Ever heard of Dell, Compaq, or IBM?)

I don't know a whole lot about Dell or Compaq, but I know that IBM still assembles their machines in their market...so, an american machine gets made somewhere close to the US and a european machine gets assembled in europe. And then again, I don't think many ppl would call Dell, Compaq, or IBM cheap.

And, isn't it funny that at least Dell an IBM are American companies (not certain about Compaq)...this is why the dollar is higher...

Re:US Manufacturing

[nuggz]

GM cars are cheaper in Canada then the US.
Check out gmcanada.com

The high US dollar drives down the cost of imports and raises the relative cost of US labour.

Standard of Living in Canada and the US is similar, but the relative curency shift makes some things a little odd.
For instance people only want to spend 50% of their annual income on a car. Your salary is still paid in local currency, the car must be priced in the local currency.
This is why companies hedge against currency fluxuations.

Why the HDD business is ailing...

[WIAKywbfatw]

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.

Re:Why the HDD business is ailing...

[essdodson]

We're soon approaching critical mass. The point at which everyone who wants a computer has one. Sales will drop off sharply as only those who require the top of the line buy new computers and those who don't require top of the line buy those discarded machines second hand.

Re:Why the HDD business is ailing...

[Jacek Poplawski]

1. Current HDD capacities far exceed most users current demands.

So all we need is another generation of Windows, which will increase disk usage. For example every run of application will save on disk detailed log (something like strace) to help find problems when something will halt operating system. This will be extremely useful today, inside "War With Terrorism". Don't let your computer be infected - buy new opearating system with extended logging features. Buy it now, or your computer will be destroyed or will help terrorists. You have been warned.

Re:Why the HDD business is ailing...

[Surak]

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.

Let's add to MP3 fiends: gamers, 3D CAD users (I have assemblies that are 5 GB by themselves), animators, musicians, software developers, videographers, etc. These people need high--end computers.

Everyone else uses them as glorified typewriters and Internet terminals. These people can get by on 500 MHz processors, 128 MB of RAM, and 5-7 GB hard drives.

Unfortunately 'everyone else' is the majority of people. What is needed here is a killer app for this new hardware. Something that REQUIRES all of this newfound processor speed, hard drive capacity and RAM capacity. The Internet has been the killer app.

The Internet, as we all know, doesn't require gobs and gobs of speed. Not yet. Not while dialup lines are the primary way people connect to the Internet. Not until broadband is available everywhere for cheap will the Internet be a viable killer app for new hardware.

Digital photography and video were supposed to be a killer app. But these are a niche market segments, and compression has gotten better and better.....for some people this is a killer app, for others, its not.

The problem is that there is no one universal killer app anymore. Advances in hardware technology are increasingly moving toward being utilized differently by different market niches. And computer manufacturers didn't imagine that the ILECs would try to derail broadband access like they have...because otherwise, this would be THE universal killer app...but it's not, and it's not likely to be anytime in the near future.

We need to abandon this whole concept of Internet as killer app I think for now...if we want technology to progress, it has to have something to rally around. In the late 70s, early 80s it was the spreadsheet. In the late 80s/early 90s it was the GUI and desktop publishing. In the mid-to-late 90s it was the Internet. Now its....?

Right you can't name it without saying "high speed Internet." But that's not a reality... and until that is, I daresay Moore's law will slow to a crawl.

Re:Why the HDD business is ailing...

[Lord_Slepnir]

They actually already have it. It's called windows CEMENT. The power of CE. The stability of ME. The User-Freindlyness of NT

Re:Why the HDD business is ailing...

[jelle]

"3. HDDs are now commodities."

As are operating systems and word processors, but you haven't seen the price of those become marginalized (yet)...

Re:Editors need to wake up

[Mad Marlin]

The title uses "Hard Drive", while the editorial text says "Hard-Drive". Pick one?

I vote for Winchester disk.

Cyclical

[Em Emalb]

It's just a cycle, like everything else. Hard-drives pretty much outstripped (for most people) the amount of stuff they actually store. Another thing rarely mentioned is that most people are content with what they have, not because they wouldn't like a larger hard-drive, but because it is unnecessary, and things deemed unnecessary are often the first to go when money gets tight.

On the other hand, I know of one insurance company that puts all claims and paperwork in digital form in about 4 different places. This enables them to move the paper work off site and also requires them to get the largest, most top of the line hdd's they can find. Every month or so, they are bringing a new system online with bigger, better, faster.TM So, failing harddrive companies, concentrate on the businesses, not Mom and Dad with their 12GB they wont fill up, until software bloat causes them to.

Re:Cyclical

[WaKall]

Clearly, failing harddrive companies should turn to writing bloated sofware.

Re:Good for you. I do.

[FleaPlus]

So how many gigs of data on your drives is actually legal?

HD's are on their way out

[kwerle]

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?

Re:HD's are on their way out

[Graymalkin]

IBM is one of the primary development interests in MRAM technologies so your idea might have some credibility to it. It also seems like IBM's reseach is netting results that are a bit more fruitful than other groups researching MRAM. They've partnered with Infineon to bring MRAM stuff to market. We might end up seeing IBM MagStar NVRAM drives in the next couple years with decent data density.

Re:HD's are on their way out

[bjschrock]

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.

Re:HD's are on their way out

[mrm677]

Current NVRAM, based on flash memory, has a limited amount of write cycles before the part fails. Therefore, it does not currently make a viable replacement for magnetic drives in which there are frequent stores and erases.

Re:HD's are on their way out

[Jucius Maximus]

"Anyways, when in doubt, new power supplies are cheap and replacing something can make you feel better. (especially when you smash the old one with an 8lb sledge!)"

It's more fun to dropkick crappy old Acerview monitors into a dumpster. I did this (with permission, the monitors were dead) back when I was doing co-op in high school. That cRuNcH is indescribable ;-)

Re:HD's are on their way out

[Rupert]

I just bought an 7200rpm 80GB drive for $72. So thats about 90 cents/GB

Re:Am I reading this wrong?

[q-soe]

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..

Uses for this much storage

[peterdaly]

I agree that storage size has vastly outpaced demand. We have a 2 terabyte chunk of platters attached to a server which will probably triple in the next year or so, but that is not the norm.

Our "large" database servers (10's of millions of records) have more storage than they know what to with. We are currently big on 18.X gig drives at 15k rpm just beacuse we want the spindles to speed up performance. I'd rather have a 12 or 14 drive cage full of fast 18 giger ebay specials than 73 or even 36 gig drives and have a rockin price/performance ratio.

I find myself formatting drives for application servers feeling guilty that I am making partitions so big I know will never be more than a quarter full. We have web servers with less than 4 gig of space used serving about a million hits a month. Why do would we be keeping the demand up for the large drives? This drives the demand, and therefore the price and margin of the high end drives down.

The drive sizes are just growing so fast most users don't need to upgrade. It is not helped by the fact that the upgrade cycle for PC's has slowed down so much. We are replacing PC's at customers sites because the contract says it is time to replace, even though the PC is already more than powerful enough for the job they perform. How many business users really need more than a 450Mhz box on their desk? We are putting 2ghz machines on these desks now. These people run terminal emulation software, browse the web, and type.

There are many factors contributing to this hard drive problem the article talks about, these are just some personal examples I have of the reason give for the slump.

-Pete

Can some one explain for me.

[q-soe]

How this :

" which has become the last surviving independent manufacturer of disk-drive platters based in the United States."

Works with this :

" Like many of Silicon Valley's other high-technology companies, Komag has moved all of its manufacturing operations to Asia and cut its cost structure in half in the last two years. There may finally be a payoff: several analysts said the company's turnaround would soon become more visible with the addition of a prominent new customer."

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 :

" The company is left with two modern factories in Malaysia. It is controlled by two New York-based hedge funds, JDS Capital and Cerberus Partners, which specialize in acquiring debt in distressed companies. They currently hold 57.6 percent of the company's shares."

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

"Komag maintains two R&D centers in the San Francisco Bay Area and manufactures our disks in Malaysia. "

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.

Re:Can some one explain for me.

[molo]

Thanks for the details. You should write to the NYT Editor and let him know what a bogus article it is. They might even publish it in the op-ed section.

Re:Can some one explain for me.

[q-soe]

Really why bother

The author is John Markoff - as in the man who pushed the line 'Kevin Mitnick is the worlds most dangerous man'and thus was reponsible for him being treated worse than many murderers - as if accuracy in his stories or trifles like the truth are going to to bother him or his employer..

Re:Based in the US?

[nelsonal]

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.

Re:Based in the US?

[sconeu]

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.

PCI Bus is the biggest bottleneck

[hagbard5235]

The Hard Drive may be the slowest component, but the PCI bus is the big bottleneck for MANY applications. I can cache enough of the things I need to hit the disk for in memory to render the disk bottleneck irrelavent to many applications. What I can't do is drive stuff across the crappy PCI bus any faster. Could we please move away from PCI towards something better!!

Re:PCI Bus is the biggest bottleneck

[rew]

The Hard Drive may be the slowest component, but the PCI bus is the big bottleneck for MANY applications.

May I ask you what you are doing on your computer that uses your PCI bus?

You should be browsing the web (internet at a couple of megabits), playing mp3s (160k/sec uncompressed audio plus 20k/sec compressed audio), and you'll be editing stuff, and doing things with your screen. That's highbandwidth alright, but doesn't have anything to do with your PCI bus.

Roger.

Re:PCI Bus is the biggest bottleneck

[hagbard5235]

Trying to seriously drive a gig ethernet card. Trying to do network capture and analysis for a gig ethernet card. Trying to use multiple fast ethernet ports to simultaneously monitor different network points. Any of these will blow a PCI bus really fast. I currently have to spend a great deal of money on specialized equipment to do poorly what I could do with a Linux box if it the applications didn't choke on the PCI bus speed.

And don't even think about the new 10 gig ethernet you're SOL out of the box on that, curtesy of your crappy PCI bus.

Are hard disks really commodities?

[slaker]

I suppose I disagree on the very basic point that a hard disk is a commodity purchase. RAM is a commodity. I can buy a stick from any of the major manufacturers and know that I'm getting more or less the same level of quality.

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. --

Visit StorageForum

Re:Are hard disks really commodities?

[Reziac]

Actually you can't say the same about floppy drives either. Teac now makes the only good ones, tho back in the 5.25" day, Fujitsu made good FDDs too (I still have several in use with a mfg date of *1986*).

Conversely Mitsumi floppy drives are crap (made cheap, often out of spec and sometimes DOA brand new, and have a limited lifespan). Generics are worse, and if you tear them apart you'll usually find they are Mitsumi 2nds on the inside.

OTOH, you're mostly right about RAM -- in general any brand my dealer hands me will work just fine (and a lot of the generics have name-brand chips). Tho in a mission-critical situation I might still opt for genuine Micron or the like, under the theory that even if the chips are the same, perhaps the rest of the stick's electronics are not.

Re:who needs a better hard drive?

[dsoltesz]

Uhhh some of us have jobs. We use computers in our jobs. We have lots of spreadsheets, documents, images, data sets, and so forth. In some industries, I'm a low-end user sucking up 60 GB, with a lot of files backed up and deleted to make space for new work. A buddy of mine has around 900 GB, which he can only keep enough free space on for work by transferring stuff off to DVD or tape -- he has single files that won't even fit on a CD. I wonder what kind of disk space the folks at Skywalker Ranch are using...

Yeah, while a number of folks won't use more than 8GB, a whole lot more need much more.

Others of us use our computers for more than checking our e-mail. Not that the hard drive manufacturers give a shit about us at home, but I'm sucking up easily 40 GB with data (not counting my MP3's, downloaded software archive, and pr0n). I've got about 15 CDs worth of data files that have been deleted from my computers. And two of my computers also have (on top of 2GB system partitions and 8GB software partitions) 10GB each reserved for games, which I frequently have to uninstall in order to make room for the lastest-greatest cuz 10 GB just ain't as big as it used to be. Hell, I got 4 GB just for temp space, and sometimes that gets dangerously close to full.

What kind of data sucks up disk space? Digital photos, audio, video, Photoshop, Illustrator, Penthouse screensavers, AutoCAD, GIS data, UltraFractal images, satellite imagery, climate data, financial data, medical imagery, architectural drawings, circuit diagrams, tax records, databases of all flavors, source code, web design work, Bryce, games, digital elevation models, VRML worlds, Matrix wallpaper, fonts, geneology research, Maya, recipes, reference documents... and, of course, e-mail. And if you have enough decent software, there goes even more disk space.

Re:Bad Puns

[Trinn]

It's obvious. +0 Punny.
Go ahead, tell me you didn't see that coming.

Re:Komag doesn't make disk drives

[LadyJessica]

It's a shame that people are willing to pay more for a pair of shoes then [sic.] a disk drive to store their data on!

Are you sure? I think I'd rather go without a hard drive than go barefoot all the time. I think I'd rank shoes higher. Have you ever walked around town barefoot? Watch that broken glass on the sidewalk! You can't go to restaurants either. "No shoes, no shirt, no service." :-)

"pixie dust"

[kesuki]

As stated in the article, IBM had recently started to use "Pixie dust" to push the supermagnetic barrier to squeeze more data on each platter. So obviously, they ran afowl of the Pixie's union, and had to sell the business to hitachi, which relies on the gremlin's union to keep the pixies in-line.

Re:My experiences don't jibe with yours

[kesuki]

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.

Re:My experiences don't jibe with yours

[slaker]

I'd *really* like to know where you heard that. I correspond from time to time with folks with @maxtor.com addresses and never heard that particular rumor.

Not that it doesn't make sense.

Visit StorageForum

Do they really mean what they say?

[leonbrooks]

Paraburdoo Tavern once had a sign saying `No admission without shirt and shoes. Tank-tops and thongs not acceptable' until shortly after somebody complied, turning up in a shirt and shoes. Only.

Re:Sad

[kmellis]

You are so wrong about this.

There is no such thing as being "too successful". The platter manufacturers have not been "too successful", they have made poor business decisions.

Increasing platter capacity far beyond demand is exactly the equivalent of simply charging less for a product than the buyer is willing to pay.

Economically successful means the greatest production of wealth possible. The resources that went into producing a surplus of platter storage capacity could have been better used elsewhere. If you had a designed economy, and you were the designer, wouldn't you allocate just as much resources to research and production of improved platter capacity as there was a demand? Well, no, you wouldn't. If you did, then hopefully you'd recognize your mistake, and then move those resources elsewhere. This is exactly what is happening to the platter industry as a result of market forces. The system is working just fine.

No, that's 6 orders

[leonbrooks]

AKA 1,000,000x

I have a 250MB SamSung from 1993

[leonbrooks]

It's running my gateway machine as I type, and has been for 3 years. Wanna buy it? (-:

Re:Flawed drives equal lower demand

[slaker]

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

Re:One of the other factors.

[boa13]

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.

In other news...

[allanj]

Bill Gates reports that no-one will ever need more than 640KB of memory. Wait a minute - that was like two decades ago? Wow.

Does it still go?

[leonbrooks]

Plug it in and see if it blows up the PSU! (-:

Ability to store, outstrips ability to back up

[zerofoo]

Demand for storage will not increase until backup methods can scale up.

What good is that 120 GB hard drive in your machine if you can only backup 40-60 GB?

Disk storage has been really cheap for years, yet backup systems like tape and DVD are either too small or too damn expensive.

Anybody check out prices on DDS4, AIT, and other tape drives....way too expensive.

Our ability to store stuff is not dictated by hard drive space, it is dictated by backup space.

-ted

Re:Ability to store, outstrips ability to back up

[Erbo]

Solution: live backups. Put another machine on your LAN, with the same size drive. Set up a script to run that periodically copies the contents of your primary machine to the backup machine. If your primary machine's drive fails, you haven't lost anything.

Another solution: RAID-1, two drives mirroring one another. If one dies, the other one is still usable.

Of course, these don't provide the multiple-generation archiving you get with traditional backups. Still, it's a way of preventing data loss. (Now there's another solution...use multiple removable hard drives for multi-generation backup. Three big hard drives plus removable-disk trays will probably still cost less than one tape drive, and be more convenient besides.)

Re:Ability to store, outstrips ability to back up

[markmoss]

Disk mirroring DOES NOT save your arse when some nitwit MCSE lets a virus infect the server and all the data files. It will whack the mirrors too. If they'd been using the multi-generation tape backups like every _real_ backup plan has, we'd have been back and running in a couple of days, but as it was a lot of stuff simply had to be done over.

Now (a couple of years later), they do the multi-generation tapes religiously. And periodically they yell at everyone to pare their on-line files down so they can continue to backup 100G hard drives to a 40G tape! (In other words, we are limiting drive space _used_, not to what is available or affordable, but to what the backup system can handle. I do that by moving rarely used files to CD-R.)

I'm quite OK with using removable disk drives for a multiple-generation backup, as long as you actually have multiple copies, and some of them are off-site. I'm not sure how the costs compare, but this scheme ought to take care of the insufficient capacity and insufficient time excuses. And one of the worst problems with tape backups is ensuring that after a real disaster - like the computer with the tape drive burning up - you'll still be able to read the tapes. I assume that those removable disks could hook up for read-back to any SCSI equipped computer with a suitable cable?

Re:Ability to store, outstrips ability to back up

[Erbo]

I was thinking of those removable IDE drive adapters that have a tray that you bolt the drive into and a housing that fits in the computer's drive bay. If your backup drives were all fitted into those kind of trays, changing them in and out would be a breeze. In a pinch, you could unbolt the drive from its tray and connect it to a computer in the usual way. No doubt similar widgets exist for SCSI drives, should you be using those instead.

Another alternative might involve those external drives that use IEEE 1394 (FireWire, i.LINK) interfaces. Just plug and copy...and plug them into any 1394-equipped computer for recovery. At that point, you might be going beyond the price of a tape drive...but not by much, and the 1394 drives offer easy random access to files in case you need to recover individual ones.

dont throw away those old drives.

[gimpboy]

hey.

if you really have alot of drives lying around we can use them. we build computers from old parts and send them off to mexico. if you really have alot of old drives and want to unload them, i'll pay for the postage. email me if you dont mind the hassel.

Destroking

[DustMagnet]

In this article I read:

Seagate will drop the capacity of a 60GB platter to 40GB through a technical process it calls destroking.

If margins are so tight, I can't figure out how destroking could be happening. I associate intentional crippling of products with monopolies.

Re:Destroking

[DustMagnet]

I'm sorry I guess I didn't explain my point. If Seagate makes almost no money selling drives with 60GB platters (see parent article), how can they afford to disable 1/3 of the disk space and sell the drive for less. They should be losing money on every destroked drive.

I normally only see behavior like destroking on high margin items. For example, Intel CPUs (before AMD got good again).

Re:Flawed drives equal lower demand

[Erbo]

Remember, Maxtor used to be MiniScribe, who once stooped as far as shipping bricks instead of disk drives to book revenue. But since then, they've reformed and gotten their shit together.

I've been burned by the IBM drives recently, too. The reason Electric Minds is down right now is because the company that made our server put IBM DeskStar drives in it. Even a replacement drive I bought started failing mere months after I installed it, whereas I have Maxtor drives that have been in service for three years and longer, and have never failed once. The server disks are being replaced with new Maxtors now; I don't expect them to give any trouble...but it'll be a cold day in hell before I recommend anyone buy an IBM DeskStar.

Re:I want a silent hard drive, not a fast hard dri

[Erbo]

I just installed a Maxtor 80 Gb 5400 RPM drive in my PC, and it's very quiet...quieter than my old 13 Gb unit. In fact, it seems like I can't hear the new drive at all. Certainly not when the CD-ROM is spinning...now that makes a racket.

Re:Sad

[kmellis]

Er, "Well, no, you wouldn't" should have been the opposite. Or the previous should have been the opposite. Urgh.

I must have read that three times without noticing that stupid error.

Re:Hm.

[Wakko Warner]

I'm not a total retard

I'm just very demanding and trying to make the most of cheap hardware.

Those two statements are in direct conflict with each other.

There is no such thing as "cheap, fast, and good".

- A.P.

Re:who needs a better hard drive?

[geekoid]

If the people at Skywalker Ranch are keeping there work files on there local computer, there admin should be slapped.

Your use is in the very, very tiny minority of computer needs.
That said, you should be using a SCSI disk array and not using an IBM clone.

HD size linked to broadband speeds?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:One of the other factors.

[boa13]

I know you are talking about speed. But your whole "I know better than the professionals" attitude just begged to be answered that way.

It makes no sense to say that hard drives are "the slowest thing that you use". This is completely not true and means nothing, no matter how many times you repeat it. The slowest thing I've used today was a floppy and a remote connection to my box in Europe.

Now that the graphics cards have been moved to their own bus, it's true that in most boxen, the "other" PCI cards don't take much bandwidth. That said, the SoundBlaster Live! designers have had issues with the latency of the bus. But the problem here is to put more than one drive on the PCI bus. I don't religiously read hardware site every morning, but as far as I know, hard drives have a bandwidth somewhere around 35 MB/sec. Put two of them on your bus, use them, and you'll be eating 55% of the bandwidth of the bus. One more drive, and you're done with the PCI bus. Oh, by the way, how can you call 35 MB/sec "pitiful"? What do you compare it against?

Now, I don't know "much" about the PCI bus, though we perhaps don't have the same idea of what "much" is, and I'd like to know what the reason for the unpopularity of the 64-bits bus is. But of course, your didn't lower yourself in giving it.

So, nowadays nothing really differentiates 5400 rpm from 7200 rpm? But there are 15000 rpm disks available, too. Why buy one big slow hard drive when you can buy smaller, faster ones? The choice is yours, so don't whine about it. As for the removable media, it has not been designed to be slow. Like anything in a computer, it has been designed to be as fast as possible, and it is as fast as possible, and as fast as your money can buy.

The end of your post doesn't make much sense, but at least it shows us how much time you've been around; not enough. Yeah, sure HD technology hasn't changed since the Pentium was introduced, you know what, it hasn't changed for 20 years, even. Yet, well, I prefer my new hard drive.

Since you seem to know so well how to save the hard-drive world, go work for them. And bring us faster and cheaper hard drive. It's so easy, I just can't understand why I'm not doing it myself.

Re:Editors need to wake up

[Mad Marlin]

large calibre? get custom-built imported 20mm cannons or better, don't go with American brands. I personally do not know where to find them, here in Canada gun laws are a little more restrictive.

In light of recent events (the previous year specifically) good luck getting your purchase into the country.

20mm! I said large calibre, but just to avoid hearing about .22LRs. Hell, 20mm is a standard anti-aircraft cannon calibre. I was thinking more along the lines of a .270MAG or .300MAG.

That's 6 orders of magnitude

[leonbrooks]

The `of magnitude' is the implied default. With three orders of fries, and shakes all 'round.

Min wage creaste unemployement

[nuggz]

Lets say the miniumum wage is $5/hr
I have a job opening that will be profitable for me if I pay $5/hr.
I pay $5/hr, make profit everyone wins.

Raise the minimum wage to $6/hr, I don't make a profit at that wage, so I don't hire anyone.
Someone is unemployed, and I don't make profit, and others don't benefit from my service. But at least we didn't exploit that unemployed guy.

Re:My experiences don't jibe with yours

[WNight]

It seems the 120gxp line has problems too.

Check out this graph of access rates on a new 120GB 120GXP.

http://www.storagereview.com/benchimages/IC35L12 0A VVA07_str.png
(Watch for extra spaces)

The spotty performance is likely caused by a ton of bad sectors which were moved to the end of the drive. If it's like that when it ships imagine what it'd be like in a few months. Check the STR graphs for other drives by Maxtor, WD, and Seagate. They aren't perfect smooth lines perhaps, but there's none of what you see on the IBM.

Mexico???!!!

[commodoresloat]

You're probably sending them to Juarez!!! Pirate.