WD soaked in sales cash bonanza after Thai flood hell Western Digital, the world's number two hard drive vendor, is bouncing back after Thai floods wiped out disk assembly lines - but not quite enough to grab Seagate's crown. WD has included just three weeks of acquired Hitachi GST's earnings, $614m, in its third quarter fiscal 2012 results, but even so has seen a pronounced …
Now that the formerly-huge number of hard drive makers has dwindled to just two, we have a near-monopoly situation.
Now -- from a buyer's perspective -- would be a good time for a small, nimble company with clever engineers to pop in at the bottom of the market.
Up to a point. At the moment you'd never get the capital to finance a new HDD company, because most people believe that the time of the HDD is ending, and the future is SSD (including the various not yet on the market technologies).
If you were |(maybe are) a clever tech entrpreneur, would you focus on nice SSD firmware venture, using a handful of software engineers accompanied by somebody elses fab for production, with every prospect of a profitable sale and exit in three years, or would you get involved in HDDs, where you need manufacturing design skills, mechanical engineering capabilities, a tad of electrical engineering, deep expertise in magnetic storage, maybe some software skills for smart caching or optimsied reads and writes etc, all for a business that's seen to be on its way out?
Whether that's true or not we'll find out only in hindsight, and I'm not taking a view here, but that belief is why people are selling their HDD businesses, and why there's few obvious new entrants. I would guess that there's actually a good few years life left in HDD's, that's why WD and Seagate are still mopping up competitors, and I think you'll find that China might spring us a few new HDD makers yet.
The lack of competition and higher prices probably aren't important to enterprise buyers - it is just a marginal inconvenience, but a very small bump in the costs of a datacentre
"The lack of competition and higher prices probably aren't important to enterprise buyers - it is just a marginal inconvenience, but a very small bump in the costs of a datacentre"
If you can get the drives. Maybe it's different for big enterprise, but for SME it's virtually impossible to get your hands on SAS drives.
You can't just go by your personal experiences when judging reliability. Random data produces lots of meaningless patterns. For example I've never had a problem with a drive evenly divisible by 12.
For any drive manufacturer X there is someone whose has first hand experience with horrible reliability from brand X.
Even if you look up long term reliability data, reliability is going to vary greatly within a manufacturer model to model. By the time there is enough information the drive is obsolete and no longer sold.
I just assume that any drive is going to die at any time, and plan your backup and recovery strategies accordingly. I always buy twice as much capacity as I need, so that I will always have room on an external for my weekly backups.
When you're buying your storage half a petabyte at a time, drives make up a substantial part of array pricing (at the moment it's about 1/2 - 2/3 of the total when buying 2Tb units)
One thing most admins seem to agree on though - drive reliability is getting a lot worse overall.
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