iTotals - September `02 (IT Monthly Roundup)
Data storage
In this section as in the Video the news structure gives out very interesting results: a lot of news on HDDs, on DVD and very little on CD-R/CD-RW. This is quite indicative and gives a clear idea of the current trends. We start off with the CD-RW so as to move on to the major areas.
In fact, there is not much to speak about the CD-RW: all the same as before. A few models of 48X CD-RW drives have been announced, and the prices for low-end models have gone down: in Taiwan the retail prices for 16X models have gone down to $40. So have the prices for CD-R drives, and the trend will stay: in September, three largest disk drive manufacturers received a permission from the government to build three new factories in China at 30 mln disks/month of total production output. Also keep in mind that Sanyo, HD-BURN have presented a second technology for doubling the capacity of standard disks (up to 1.4 GB). Reading such disks will be effected by any of the currently existing disk drives - it suffices to update the software only. All in all, the CD branch is evolving at its very natural pace, and it's still a too long way to go until it dies away.
While the DVD is still at the beginning of the road, it is evolving at the same pace. Sony has produced their first comprehensive drives which are able to read (and write!) all the DVD formats at the same time, although the practical sense of that is not so evident - there are hardly enough users willing to write DVD-RW disks on even days and DVD+RW on odd days. In any case, the user would rather prefer a certain format, and it's up to the manufacturers of DVD-ROM drives and other reading devices to decide whether to support one format or the other suggested by the competitor. This should be better addressed to Panasonic who developed a chipset supporting the DVD-Multi, i.e. providing right what we mentioned above: operation with DVD-RAM, DVD-R and DVD-RW.
There is one more benefit in writing devices - new DVD-RW drives have appeared recently on the market which provide the 4X recording speed and 2X in re-recording, although the respective specifications were established no earlier than in August. What is more, Mitsubishi has already released a laser providing the 8X recording speed, which will allow to write a standard 4.7 GB disk in as fast as 7 minutes.
As to the hard disk drives, the past month proved extremely attractive, with Maxtor being the undisputable leader who early this month presented their new 40 GB models Fireball 3 and DiamondMax Plus 8 as well as professional DiamondMax Plus 9, DiamondMax 16 models having up to 160 GB in capacity, and then a brand-new line, MaXLine, aimed at operation on a 24/7 basis. This is still UltraATA/133 but the capacity increased to 320 GB and the mean-time-between-failures being over 1 mln hours. And finally, in about the middle of the month new models of fast hard disk drives, Maxtor Atlas 15K (15,000 rpm Ultra320 SCSI), were announced having the capacity up to 73 GB.
At the same time, the guarantee issued by Maxtor for their HDDs has been reduced from three to one year. On the other hand, almost the same was announced by Western Digital and Seagate, so this is at least not a unique occurrence but more likely to be a trend. Not that the disks turned less reliable - on the contrary. With the competition and price wars getting fierce, the manufacturers simply found a new more niche for savings. Let the reliability be high at short guarantee term rather than the contrary. A reminder - Fujitsu had to withdraw up to 300 thousand of their HDDs produced during the last year.
By the way, Maxtor was far not the only manufacturer of hard disks who showed activity in September: Western Digital informed they launched their next model of the Caviar SE family (with a 8 Mb buffer) having already a 200 GB capacity and 7200 rpm speed. A real monster among the ATA monsters. WD although have something to offer in the sphere of USB 2.0, but the maximum capacity of the new line is reduced to 120 GB. Anyway, this capacity will be more than enough for 99.9% of tasks.
With all this going on, Seagate has had to demonstrate only their Serial ATA product. Yes, this time it was Serial ATA II! The prototype of such a HDD was presented by the company at the recent IDF, and we are looking forward to seeing the first generation of Serial ATA Seagate HDDs already in this quarter. But SerialATA II products will appear on the market in no earlier than two years - in the second half of 2004.
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