Despite a sharp decline in units shipped this year, manufacturers continue their race to increase hard disk drive capacities.
In the past couple weeks, both hard disk drive makers Seagate and Western Digital announced their “standalone” 2 terabytes drives targeted at opposite markets, one for enterprise servers and storage and the other for consumers, desktops and workstations.
The Western Digital’s Caviar Green 3.5-inch drive is currently shipping for about $300 whereas Seagate’s Constellation family of enterprise drives won’t be available before Spring; no words yet on pricing but it’s going to be on the very expensive side.
“Both drives feature low power consumption but Seagate’s offers the lowest power consumption in the industry: SATA (Serial ATA) versions consume 2.4 watts of power in idle mode, while the SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) versions consume 2.8 watts while idle,” claims a Seagate spokesperson.
For storage analyst Tom Coughlin, capacities will continue to increase this year, reaching 2.5 terabytes for 3.5-inch drives.
“It looks like a 40-50% annual capacity growth rate in the last three years,” explains Coughlin. “I project a 3 TB drive by 2010 and 6 TB by 2012. In 2009, we will see 2.5-inch drives with 600 or 700+ GB and 1.8-inch drives with a capacity of 300 GB or more.”
Last year, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies – which just named its first President – was the first-to-market with a 1 TB drive, then Seagate was the first to break through the terabyte barrier with a 1.5 TB drive. This time, Western Digital was first to launch a 2 terabyte drive. Samsung?
