ITotals: October`2002
Data storage
The month was rifed with new announced technologies and initiatives. As for hard drives, there is in fact only one classical desktop family released in October - IBM Deskstar 180GXP, its size varies from 30 to 180 GB, and this family is a response to the latest 200-250 GB solutions from Maxtor and Western Digital, but here IBM focused mostly on the speed (the size is high enough): the new "tag 'n seek" technology allows to lift the data rate up to 25%.
At the same time IBM closed its Hungarian HDD factory saying that the demand for hard drives was quite weak. The HDD makers have to save on many things these days,
just look how short the warranty periods became. However, WD now offers again a 3-year warranty but at $20. Because of such steps (or thanks to them) WD showed excellent results in the quarter ended in September: sales volume of $583M and revenue of $22M. Both figures look much better compared to the previous month and previous year. Seagate also achieved a lot: $1579 billion and $110 million respectively. The prospects look optimistic, and we should believe WD and Seagate that this business is not that bad.
New logo of Seagate
Another new solution is a 60 GB 2.5'' hard drive from Toshiba rotating at 5400 rpm which will certainly be used in High-End notebooks and likely in digital video recorders
and other similar devices. Also, we've got new external drives from Maxtor - Personal Storage 5000 having the size from 80 to 250 GB and USB 2.0 and FireWire interfaces.
Maxtor Personal Storage 5000
As for new technologies, October brought us the final version of the 1.0 Serial ATA II specification (Serial ATA II: Extensions to Serial ATA 1.0 Specification), and a week later Intel released the first disc controller supporting that specification. But they ratified only the first part, the second part dealing with data rates up to 300 MB/s will appear in the second half of 2003.
In the CD-RW sphere nothing has changed much - there are a lot of new models as always, only the top models now have formulas like 52/24/52 (whether it's rational to produce such models is highly arguable). The mainstream sector now includes models of such speeds as 48/24/48; thankfully, CD-R 48Õ media has become quite popular with manufacturers. By the way, in October VIA kicked off production of 48Õ CD-RW controllers at the TSMC's factories. Last year the optical department of the company managed to spin up very well: from 0 to 1.5M pieces a month. The strengthening competition will certainly force down the prices.
The DVD drives haven't jumped over 16Õ yet and most new solutions are either internal models for notebooks or external drives. And most of them are DVD-ROM/CD-RW drives. As for DVD recorders, the manufacturers prefer mainly the DVD+R/RW format (only such models were released last month). The DVD+RW Alliance keeps on improving it - it has lately founded the Recorder Group DVD+RW Compatibility and Convergence Group. But the competitors are not dozing - in this quarter they promise DVD-Multi drives supporting DVD-RAM and DVD-RW discs.
The only parameter common for all the formats is 4Õ speed. NEC unleashed the first DVD-R/DVD+R drive with such write speed, Mitsubishi was first to release 4Õ DVD+R discs, CenDyne promised the first 4Õ DVD-R/DVD-RW drive in October. But the most important news on the market of DVD recorders were prices! The Sony DCR-500UL which supports almost all formats will be available at $500 for the external version and $400 for the internal one!
Sony DCR-500UL
Supported formats
But it's still nothing compared to the Blu-ray Disc! Though on the other hand, the Blu-Ray is not going to leave the prototypes yet: at CEATEC prototypes of DVD players working with 25-50 GB discs were showed off by Hitachi, Matsushita Electric, Pioneer, Philips, Sharp, Sony, JVC, and TDK. There were competitive solutions as well: thus, Toshiba demonstrated a DVD player able to work with data on discs of 15 GB per layer; note that their technology is very similar to the today's DVD techniques; it means that the cost of media and equipment won't differ much either. The technology promoted by Toshiba and NEC competes directly against the Blu-ray.
Matsushita Blu-ray
In November the market will possibly bring us a new player from Taiwan - Advanced Optical Storage Research Consortium which is going to offer the HD-DVD (High-Definition DVD) format with 15-17 GB discs. It promises the minimal license taxes to owners of the respective patents, in contrast to the current DVD formats. Well, chaos is not weakening.
Additional materials:
 ITotals September`2002
 |
Top Stories: |
 |
 |
|
MoBo:
| |
|
|
VGA Card:
|
|
|
|
CPU & Memory:
|
|
