Hitachi and Seagate are the price leaders in the 2TB internal drive category
At the current pace, an internal 2TB drive will cost under $100 in about 6 months.
So by the same time next year, it will be as hard to find 1TB drives as it today for 500GB! And I won’t be surprised to find some Black Friday deals for 2TB drives (internal or external) close to the $100 barrier.
Interestingly, the 1.5TB drive category didn’t really had time to establish itself in the market, squeezed by the super low cost 1TB drives and the 2TB drives.
In the 2TB internal drive category, Hitachi – which also owns the low-cost Simpletech brand – and Seagate are the price leaders. For 1TB internal drives, Western Digital is still the company to beat at less than $60.
Western Digital is the price leader for 1TB disk drives!
If you think of it, that’s just 6 cents per gigabyte - 5 years ago it was almost 20 times that!
With a 1TB bare-bone (internal) disk drive at less than $60 at Fry’s Electronics, Western Digital (WD) is the absolute low price leader… for this week! The same drive cost $20 more a couple weeks ago.
The other notable price decrease since last week is a 2TB serial ATA/300 now at $160 ($10 less than Seagate) by Hitachi.
I also was impressed by the low price of the Kingston 64GB Solid-State Drive (SSD) that now only costs $100. I would recommend one in a heart beat: I revived my old MacBook with a 80GB Kingston SSD and is now doing most of the video post-production (importing, editing and exporting)!
An external 2TB disk drive from SimpleTech is only $10 more than its internal equivalent from Seagate
Disk drive prices simply defy gravity… and probably economics too!
Looking at Fry’s Electronics daily ads in the San Jose Mercury News, I couldn’t help but being amazed at how quickly disk drives prices are plunging on a weekly, if not daily basis.
Today, the best value for an internal drive, is the 1.5TB 3.5″ Samsung drive at only $80. If you prefer an external drive, SimpleTech’s 2TB Duo Pro Drive Quad (Firewire, eSATA and USB) is hard to beat at only $180. And an external 2TB Seagate desktop drive will cost you $180.
If that’s still too much, I’m sure you can still find SimpleTech’s 1TB external drive for under $90 or its internal cousin (from Hitachi) at $85!
For laptops, Hitachi is still the king of the hill with a 500GB notebook hard drive at just $80 (and just $10 more on Amazon). I also liked Seagate’s 1.5TB Expansion drive for $125, although it’s only $5 more at Amazon with free shipping.
Really no matter where you buy your drive, you’ll almost certain to get a bargain. Happy shopping!
When launching the latest Xeon server chip, Intel conveniently omitted to talk about its “other” server family, the Itanium.
Probably because Itanium has simply not lived up to the expectation Intel – and others – set forth, almost 15 years ago.
Then Itanium was predicted to dominate the server business, and then trickle down to eventually get into desktops and notebooks. And ultimately replace the X86 architecture altogether, recalls chip analyst Nathan Brookwood.
Well, obviously that didn’t happen and never will even if all of the major server suppliers like H-P, Unisys, Hitachi, NEC, Silicon Graphics – but to the exception of Sun and IBM – have adopted Itanium as their mainframe alternative platform.
“Itanium has become the prefered plaftorm for the also rans in the server business,” quipped Brookwood.
Despite its commercial failure, Intel still wants to hang on to Itanium. And that’s because, Itanium is the only server chip in Intel’s arsenal that can actually compete with the reliability and scalability of its rival RISC-processors like Sun’s SPARC or IBM’s POWER. “[Itanium] is delivering to that very high end mission critical market segment,” explained Pat Gelsinger, Intel’s vice president in charge of the server business.
However, to lower development costs, Intel decided to converge the Itanium platform to the Xeon platform (chipset, QPI’s fast interconnect…). “That will happen when the next generation of the Itanium chip, Tukwila, will launch [probably later this year],” adds Brookwood.
The good news for enterprise customers and the server OEMs like H-P, is that Itanium is not going away. The bad news for Intel, is that it will never be a growth opportunity.
Here’s an excerpt of Brookwood’s comments on Itanium:
With Fujitsu's drive business acquisition, Toshiba will lead the small form factor hard disk drives market
When it announced last month its biggest operating losses since it started reporting earnings in 1949, Toshiba said it was still betting on a rebound.
Today, in acquiring Fujitsu‘s money loosing hard disk drive business – under the nose of competitor Western Digital – Toshiba is putting its money where its mouth is.
The Japanese makers didn’t divulge the amount of the transaction but point out that the combine operations will propel Toshiba as the number one maker of 2.5-inch hard-disk drives with more than a 30% market share, surpassing Hitachi and Western Digital, which each a 22% market share.
Will Toshiba sell Fujitsu’s enterprise drives to Hitachi?
However, Toshiba will now have to decide if it keeps Fujitsu’s line of enterprise disk drives and enter this new market, or sell it to Hitachi, and stick on making drives for mobile and consumer electronics devices.
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?
One after the other, Japanese electronics companies are being hit by a double whammy: the sudden global consumer demand collapse and the appreciation of the yen versus the dollar.
Last in turn is Panasonic, which said today it expects a net loss of $4.2 billion for its fiscal year ending March 31, and plans to close 27 manufacturing sites (13 in Japan and 14 abroad) – about 12% of its global production facilities- and lay off 15,000 workers - 5 per cent of its global workforce – by March 2010. Half of the cuts will be in Japan.
Earlier this month, NEC announced it is cutting 20,000 jobs, while Hitachi, Sony, Toshiba and others have also recently announced thousands of layoffs.
In a press conference in Tokyo, Panasonic’s management did not say when they expect sales to eventually turn around.
Seagate warned yesterday that it now expects revenues for the current quarter to be in the range of $2.3 to $2.6 billion, which is about $500 million off previous projections, communicated just a little over a month ago.
The world’s largest disk drive maker also confirmed our earlier report that it is in a midst of a major restructuring analysis to slash production capacity and its workforce – rumored to be up to 20% – as well as impose a company-wide mandatory holiday shutdown.
“We can make money at $3 billion a quarter. We can even make money at $2 billion. But we can not make money If I think it’s $3 billion and it ends up only $2 billion,” admits Watkins.
In a meeting with financial analysts in San Francisco, Seagate CEO Bill Watkins said that sales were “decent” up until the second week of November when demand suddenly “pullback”; affecting sales in retail, enterprises and PC manufacturers or OEMs.
A deteriorating situation that quickly resulted in a price war among hard drive makers including Western Digital, Samsung, Fujitsu, Hitachi and Toshiba.
“We didn’t want to try to make this quarter. We decided we need to pull back, get pricing under control and focus on the long term opportunity,” adds Watkins.
Other comments from Seagate’s CEO on his views of the troubled disk drive market:
We made deals that were not making financial sense, that were screwing up the next quarter.
We have to be disciplined and walk away from bad deals.
Asia is the strongest market by far, the U.S. the weakest and Europe is in the middle but falling rapidly too.
Russia, Ukraine, Brazil and Korea (melt down) were the other geographical areas that were hit hard mainly because of the credit crunch
During a questions and answers session with Wall Street analysts, Seagate CEO, Bill Watkins said he anticipates a “Japanese consolidation” of hard-disk drive makers Hitachi, Fujitsu and Toshiba.
As opposed to Western Digital buying Fujitsu’s hard-disk drive business as Nikkei newspaper reported earlier this month.
Watkins also just doesn’t understand why Samsung is still in the disk-drive business “having spent the money they’re doing” and not making money!
“If you haven’t made money last year, you will certainly not make money next year”, said Watkins.
Finally, Seagate’s CEO doesn’t believe in an upcoming price war to drive competitors out of business. “We’re going to grow shares responsibly”, he adds.
Can anyone @IBM fix the WiFi network at #IOD11 ? It's been terrible for the past 2 days and everybody I talked just can't stand it anymore 7 months ago
Posted by TechPulse 360 
