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The Hard Business of Selling Hard Drive Platters 319

Posted by timothy from the weep-for-them dept.
redfieldp writes: "This is a pretty interesting story about the 'last' HD manufacturer in the U.S., and reasons why the industry is ailing ..." There's quite a bit of interesting hard-drive history in here, too.
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The Hard Business of Selling Hard Drive Platters More

The Hard Business of Selling Hard Drive Platters

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  • And its not even english, like the rest of the site. Blech!
  • The title uses "Hard Drive", while the editorial text says "Hard-Drive". Pick one?

    • Re:Editors need to wake up (Score:4, Funny)

      by Mad Marlin ( 96929 ) <cgore@cgore.com> on Monday July 01, 2002 @10:51PM (#3805198) Homepage
      The title uses "Hard Drive", while the editorial text says "Hard-Drive". Pick one?

      I vote for Winchester disk.

  • /. screwed the link, and now everyone is posting a proper link. I just wish they had posted the circumvented link instead of the reg. required one...

  • This is a pretty interesting story about http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/01/technology/01KOM A.html>the 'last' HD manufacturer in the U.S., and reasons why the industry is ailing ...


    double check those URLs and HTML tags!


    I tell you, nobody takes any pride in their work anymore :/

  • Commodity business (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DeafDumbBlind ( 264205 ) on Monday July 01, 2002 @10:22PM (#3805051)
    The drive market has been a commodity business for several years now. There's very little to distinguish the top offerings from the various vendors. IBM's exit from the drive arena recently was a reminder of this. A few years ago when I was part of a team designing a high-end RAID controller, it was the concensus of all the engineers that IBM made the best SCSI drives. They were dumbing billions into R&D and they still couldn't differenciate their offerings enough to make it profitable.

    Here's waiting for fast solid state storage...

  • heh (Score:3, Funny)

    by hatter3bdev ( 533135 ) on Monday July 01, 2002 @10:23PM (#3805066)
    The problem is they just work too well and nobody pays any attention.

    I Guess we know why windows is so popular then :-)
  • So what?

    Do they make cheaper, better, or larger hard drives than their competitors? On this, the article is silent.

    I'm all for mindless flag waving, but only so far as I don't have to pay extra for it.
    • A commodity, by definition is a product which is the same regardless from who you buy it from. Indistinguishable in quality and price.

      Maybe people claim that hard drives are commodity items. If what they're saying is true, than the article had nothing to say about how this company's product compares to other hard drive companies' product, because there was nothing to be said.

    • Re:Based in the US? (Score:3, Informative)

      by sconeu ( 64226 )
      If you go to Komag's web site [komag.com], you'll see that they don't make drives, they make drive platters, which they sell to drive OEMs.
  • And probably soon to be gone completely.

    I accidentally clicked on the link to Komag Incorporated's stock prices... Hoooooooo boy.

    Open $ 0.01

    High $ 0.01

    Low $ 0.00

    How do you get a low of $0.00??? How come my stock broker didn't call me that second and have me buy ten million shares? He's fired!
    • from the article

      " It hasn't been easy. On Monday, Dr. Bajorek's company will announce that it is successfully emerging from Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which the company entered in May 2001."

      Honestly before commenting please read the article... Companies in Chapter 11 are not traded thus they have a 0.00 dollar share price..

  • My speculation... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Ziviyr ( 95582 ) on Monday July 01, 2002 @10:35PM (#3805132) Homepage
    there has been industry speculation that Millipede is the secret advantage that led I.B.M. to decide to sell its disk-drive business to Hitachi.

    I speculate it might have been due to IBM's hideous failure to manufacturing stable drives that cause them to sell out. 60% failure rate here, and thats not the floor of it!

    • Re:My speculation... (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      60%? Maybe you should stop buying your parts from places where manufacturers dump their defective shit (aka PriceWatch).

      If 60% of the drives in IBM's own machines failed, they'd be out of business right now.
  • 'last' HD manufacturer in the U.S., and reasons why the industry is ailing

    Because American workers are over-paid and the "strong" US dollar makes imports cheaper?

    • Re:US Manufacturing (Score:5, Insightful)

      by OneFix ( 18661 ) on Monday July 01, 2002 @11:59PM (#3805481)
      I wish this were the case, but it is generally not that American workers are over-paid, but the workers in other countries are under-paid (read exploited).

      Just look at what happens...when was the last time you heard about the cheap imports from France...how about the UK...what about Germany...or Canada...or even Japan (most of the cheap electronics are made in countries like Korea and Hong Kong).

      No...the truth is, it's just cheaper to buy a worker in developing/under-developed countries.

      But, in the long run, it helps drive down the cost of an American worker which makes every country's workers suffer.

      ...Now, don't get me wrong, there are overpaid American workers, but there are also overpaid workers in most every industry and in most every developed country.

      • Re:US Manufacturing (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Citizen of Earth ( 569446 ) on Tuesday July 02, 2002 @01:39AM (#3805763)
        I wish this were the case, but it is generally not that American workers are over-paid, but the workers in other countries are under-paid (read exploited).

        The economics of this sort of thing are all relative. If I lived in a third-world country and made one-tenth of my present salary, effectively I would be wealthy beyond all belief. Yeah, I'd sure be exploited!

        Just look at what happens...when was the last time you heard about the cheap imports from France...how about the UK...what about Germany...or Canada

        Cheap is a relative term, but costs are significantly lower for manufacturers in Canada, for instance. That is why so many American cars are made in Canada. Canadian workers are paid relatively less (or, as I said before, American workers are over-paid), and the 'artifically' low currency-exchange rate makes importing much more sensible than manufacturing in the US. You also get an educated and skilled workforce as good as or better than in the US. OTOH, the US is a big market with a big appetite for imports. Common business sense says to move cost centers (manufacturing/production) to Canada (or various other countries) and profit centers (sales) to America.

        No...the truth is, it's just cheaper to buy a worker in developing/under-developed countries.

        Well yeah. In a system of global economics, each country has different circumstances and can offer different comparative advantages. Third-world countries sometimes have raw natural resources to trade, but they always have cheap labour to offer.

        But really, one needs to question the notion that these workers are 'exploited', given that the 'exploitation' happens on a voluntary basis. The only conclusion is that the 'exploitation' (by first-world standards) is significantly better than the alternative, presumably subsistance farming, begging, or starving to death. The anti-globalization protesters never seem to grapple with this issue. [A prosperous nation doesn't just appear overnight, and international welfare will never create one. Prosperity is the result of a long bootstrapping process that only possible under a responsible government.]

        But, in the long run, it helps drive down the cost of an American worker which makes every country's workers suffer.

        Bullshit. In the long run, the economics balance out to where workers are compensated in proportion to their skills and relative worth. Everybody wins in this circumstance. Perhaps American workers will ultimately stop being over-paid, but the rest of the world won't suffer because of this. With greater economic efficiency, the global standard of living increases.

        but there are also overpaid workers in most every industry and in most every developed country

        That's pretty much a tautology. For various political and fixed forces, some workers are paid more than they are worth, because the free market has been retarded from functioning properly.
        • The economics of this sort of thing are all relative. If I lived in a third-world country and made one-tenth of my present salary, effectively I would be wealthy beyond all belief. Yeah, I'd sure be exploited!

          Of course the statement in your origonal post seemed to overlook this fact by just saying that American workers are over-paid...what you should have said is that American workers are paid more than those working in under-developed/developing nations. Which is why the average American worker has a higher standard of living than say someone living in Mexico or Korea. And I would agree with that, but I hardly think that justifies the origonal statement.

          Bullshit. In the long run, the economics balance out to where workers are compensated in proportion to their skills and relative worth. Everybody wins in this circumstance. Perhaps American workers will ultimately stop being over-paid, but the rest of the world won't suffer because of this. With greater economic efficiency, the global standard of living increases.

          Wrong...history has proven that the gap between the haves (those living in developed countries) and the have-nots (those living in under-developed/developing countries) becomes larger over time. Your assumption is that as soon as american workers are willing to accept a lower salary, then that will increase the salary of someone working in an under-developed/developing country...and that just isn't true. When the cost of an american worker goes down, then the cost of a similar worker in another country has to go down as well...it doesn't as you say "balance out". As countries become more prosperous, then their workers get paid more, and then eventually their workers lose jobs to ppl in another developing country...

          Consumers will never pay more for the same exact product (except in certain circumstances like memory where supply is limited). This is the problem with this viewpoint...as soon as an "exploited" worker's salary starts to go up, the company that once prefered to exploit the workers in this once poor country will find a new country to exploit (probably somewhere like Afganistan)...

          The flaw in this thinking is that companies that move production to countries where their workers are willing to work for lower pay will somehow stay there because their workers either have a higher education (how does that work...poor workers in developing countries are somehow given better opportunities)??? Or are making a better product...

          I don't know about you, but most of the products I've seen from developing nations are of poorer quality than those from developed nations (Just ask someone if they'ld prefer to drive a Kia or a Toyota)...

          It's simple, exploited workers in developing nations are kept on a short leash and if they demand more or become "difficult", the same company that didn't hesitate to give them a lower pay/less benifits/etc will move to another location where the workers are not as "problematic"...

          Like it or not, companies that do this have no loyalty to their employees...
          • Of course the statement in your origonal post seemed to overlook this fact by just saying that American workers are over-paid...

            American workers on average, compared to all other workers in the world, including the industrialized nations, are paid disportionality high wages for the value of the work that they do. I think that "over-paid" is a pretty good summary of this situation.

            what you should have said is that American workers are paid more than those working in under-developed/developing nations.

            And industrialized nations.

            Which is why the average American worker has a higher standard of living than say someone living in Mexico or Korea.

            South Koreans have a surprisingly high standard of living, almost on par with industrialized nations ($16K+ per capita purchasing-power parity). North Korea is pretty much a poster child of Communistic poverty. Mexico has big problems with government corruption and low education. An interesting related stat is that 80% of Canadians have a higher standard of living than 80% of Americans (except for the richest quintile). Don't delude yourself that America is the end-all and be-all of living standards or that it is immune from the laws of economics. Farmer subsidies, tarrifs, etc., serve to lower your standard of living.

            Your assumption is that as soon as american workers are willing to accept a lower salary, then that will increase the salary of someone working in an under-developed/developing country...and that just isn't true.

            You're confusing cause and effect. Basically, I am saying that freer trade will cause American wages to go down, because they are disportionately high w.r.t. making products elsewhere for cheaper.

            Salaries in developing countries will increase as their labour forces acquire more skills and improved infrastructure for more production capability. As they are able to do more work, such as with India and software development, they will get more work and Americans will need to become more competitive (or reduce wages). Competition is a great equalizer.

            In the bigger picture, economics is not a zero-sum game. It's one of few processes in which everyone can win.

            When the cost of an american worker goes down, then the cost of a similar worker in another country has to go down as well...it doesn't as you say "balance out".

            I don't see why. All that matters is that the foreign worker be competitive against the American worker. He could even be paid more if his productivity was higher. The Japanese steel industry, for example, is about twice as productive per worker than the American steel industry. This is mostly the result of investment in infrastructure, which I guess just isn't a sexy thing to do in America. I don't know what their wages are like.

            As countries become more prosperous, then their workers get paid more, and then eventually their workers lose jobs to ppl in another developing country...

            Well yeah, as developing countries become more competitive, workers in more-developed countries will need to justify their wages. Invariably, low-skill/low-pay jobs will migrate to the less developed nations, since they can supply low-skilled labour cheaper.

            But, these developing nations that loose low-skill jobs to less developed nations will also acquire the critical mass of education, skills, and infrastructure to go to the "next level" and do more-complicated work, like build cars, microchips, hard drives, and televisions. Since their workers will presumably have (and require) lower wages than Americans, jobs of manufacturing hard drives, etc., will migrate away from America to "middle-tier" nations. How many television manufactures are in the US? Zero. How many hard drive makers? When IBM finishes pulling the plug, zero. America is not competitive at doing these things.

            OTOH, greater global economic efficiency means that you can buy more stuff for cheaper. If you were to suffer a 10% loss in wages but get a 20% increase in purchasing power, you've come out ahead. Your standard of living will have increased.

            Consumers will never pay more for the same exact product (except in certain circumstances like memory where supply is limited). This is the problem with this viewpoint...as soon as an "exploited" worker's salary starts to go up, the company that once prefered to exploit the workers in this once poor country will find a new country to exploit (probably somewhere like Afganistan)...

            You say that as if there were something wrong with it. Perhaps you're a protectionist? Also, it takes a large amount of infrastructure and a fair amount of labour skill to make memory chips, so Afghanistan won't be very competitive in that market for a long time.

            I don't know about you, but most of the products I've seen from developing nations are of poorer quality than those from developed nations (Just ask someone if they'ld prefer to drive a Kia or a Toyota)...

            An automobile is another complex commodity. Developing nations have a way to go before being truly competitive in that market. Textiles and farming, OTOH, for example, require significantly fewer skills. Ultimately, it's the consumer who decides what is the best product at the best price. If Kias suck, then don't buy them.

            Like it or not, companies that do this have no loyalty to their employees...

            Nor should they. Why should anyone pay more than they need to, including employers?

            Assuming that you're an American worker, I think that you've been far too pampered for far too long. The rest of the world is becoming more competitive every day. You will need to either become more productive or your wages will decrease.
            • The Japanese steel industry, for example, is about twice as productive per worker than the American steel industry. This is mostly the result of investment in infrastructure, which I guess just isn't a sexy thing to do in America.

              Actually, one might speculate that during the same period of time, Americans were busy pouring their investment dollars into dot-coms rather than hard infrastructure.
              • Most of the steel infrastructure in Japan is much, much older than the dot-com era. But for obvious reasons it had to be totally rebuilt after WWII (much of this paid for by the same American taxpayers who had paid to demolish it in the first place), while the American steel industry is still running many pre-WWII plants. And I suspect that the Japanese have also replaced equipment faster since the war - there hasn't been much interest in this country in basic industries, or in anything with 20 year payoffs. And it might actually make quite good sense that the US isn't investing in large steel plants - it may be far cheaper to buy it from foreigners than to make it here.

                By the way, one sort of steelmaking thrives in modern America - small mills producing high quality steels to order. These plants are modern. They don't make steel from ore, but purchase what they can't get by recycling. They get a fairly high price per pound, but quality and quick delivery make it worthwhile for many uses. It's no surprise that such a plant makes fewer tons per man-hour than a gigantic modern plant, which can only make a few kinds of product.
                • And it might actually make quite good sense that the US isn't investing in large steel plants - it may be far cheaper to buy it from foreigners than to make it here.

                  This must be why George W. as erected the latest round of tariffs on imported steel. No, wait a second...
          • I don't know about you, but most of the products I've seen from developing nations are of poorer quality than those from developed nations (Just ask someone if they'ld prefer to drive a Kia or a Toyota)...

            The first generation of Japanese automobiles, which arrived in America in the 1970s, also sucked.
            • As a general rule, the first generation of any product sucks. The Japanese were just beginning to get into the market. Most of these manufacturers do not have that problem. Most are somehow related to companies that have been in the business for years...like it or not, companies like IBM have no excuse for making a bad product.
        • The economics of this sort of thing are all relative. If I lived in a third-world country and made one-tenth of my present salary, effectively I would be wealthy beyond all belief. Yeah, I'd sure be exploited!
          I was in Malaysia a year ago. (This is one of the relatively successful third-world countries.) Of the half-dozen engineers I dealt with, only the chief engineer owned a car. None of them could afford to marry before 30. We were in a rural region, but the air was polluted enough to affect my sinuses - in particular, around meal-time the air fills up with smoke from all the cookfires. (I didn't ask what kind of solid fuel they were burning...)
  • I don't. I haven't filled up my 8 GB. I guess if you download lots of music and stuff an 80 GB would be nice but I think most people will never fill their hard drives.

    The business is a victim of its own success just success just like the whole computer industry is or will be IMNVHO (in my not very humble opinion).

    • Or rip DVDs, that takes lots of space too.
    • Here's my SHN partition:

      3jane:/store/shn 291891992 195551296 72989344 73% /store/shn

      Uh-huh. 300 gigs. 73% full. I put about 10 gigs a week on it (that's about 8 or 9 3-hour concerts at 16 bits/44.1 KHz). That cost me about $1000 to build back in November of last year, and I'm currently looking at 4 160 gig Maxtor drives to fill the remaining 4 slots of my 3ware card.

      Now, I may be an extreme case, but I know plenty of people who fill up their hard drives just from the applications and video games they've installed, with a few gigs of of MP3s here and there for good measure. Hell, I throw out 4 gig drives nowadays. I've got 9s and 18s that I don't even use, and about a terabyte of shit online 24/7/365. And it's data I use (MP3s, SHNs, video, 0day juarez, etc), not just shit I keep around for the hell of it (that's all on tape and CD-R.)

      Just because you're stuck in 1996 doesn't mean the rest of us haven't found a use for our big hard drives.

      - A.P.
    • Uhhh some of us have jobs. We use computers in our jobs. We have lots of spreadsheets, documents, images, data sets, and so forth. In some industries, I'm a low-end user sucking up 60 GB, with a lot of files backed up and deleted to make space for new work. A buddy of mine has around 900 GB, which he can only keep enough free space on for work by transferring stuff off to DVD or tape -- he has single files that won't even fit on a CD. I wonder what kind of disk space the folks at Skywalker Ranch are using...

      Yeah, while a number of folks won't use more than 8GB, a whole lot more need much more.

      Others of us use our computers for more than checking our e-mail. Not that the hard drive manufacturers give a shit about us at home, but I'm sucking up easily 40 GB with data (not counting my MP3's, downloaded software archive, and pr0n). I've got about 15 CDs worth of data files that have been deleted from my computers. And two of my computers also have (on top of 2GB system partitions and 8GB software partitions) 10GB each reserved for games, which I frequently have to uninstall in order to make room for the lastest-greatest cuz 10 GB just ain't as big as it used to be. Hell, I got 4 GB just for temp space, and sometimes that gets dangerously close to full.

      What kind of data sucks up disk space? Digital photos, audio, video, Photoshop, Illustrator, Penthouse screensavers, AutoCAD, GIS data, UltraFractal images, satellite imagery, climate data, financial data, medical imagery, architectural drawings, circuit diagrams, tax records, databases of all flavors, source code, web design work, Bryce, games, digital elevation models, VRML worlds, Matrix wallpaper, fonts, geneology research, Maya, recipes, reference documents... and, of course, e-mail. And if you have enough decent software, there goes even more disk space.

      • If the people at Skywalker Ranch are keeping there work files on there local computer, there admin should be slapped.

        Your use is in the very, very tiny minority of computer needs.
        That said, you should be using a SCSI disk array and not using an IBM clone.

    • Bill Gates reports that no-one will ever need more than 640KB of memory. Wait a minute - that was like two decades ago? Wow.

  • Why the HDD business is ailing... (Score:5, Informative)

    by WIAKywbfatw ( 307557 ) on Monday July 01, 2002 @10:39PM (#3805148) Journal
    Hard disk drive production capacity is far higher than demand, hence HDD manufacturers are having a harder time making a profit.

    Why is this? Well three simple reasons spring to mind.

    1. Current HDD capacities far exceed most users current demands.

    OK, so you have more than one drive in your PC, but how many of the billion PCs sold have more than one? Servers do but they make up a very small (albeit highly profitable) segment of the HDD market. Most are installed in desktop PCs and, nowadays, most people don't use more than a fraction of the 20GB+ drives that come with a modern PC. Heck, even 5GB, the kind of capacity that was typical on an entry-level desktop three years ago is more than most users get through.

    (Remember, not everyone is a MP3-fiend.)

    2. We're buying fewer PCs.

    Companies are buying fewer machines, as are private individuals.

    Companies because the desktops that they've being buying lately need to be replaced less frequently than was previously the case (because the desktops they bought three years ago still run today's software comfortably), and because they are finding few new areas (ones that they haven't already covered) where a PC will help streamline operations. The current state of the global economy doesn't help either.

    The same is essentially true for private individuals too. Anyone who wants a PC already likely has one, so why buy another one (especially in an uncertain economic climate) if the old one does the trick?

    No new PC means no new HDD.

    3. HDDs are now commodities.

    Once something becomes ubiquitous and readily available, as HDDs have in the last five years, then it no longer demands a price premium. Fiercer competition means small profits, which means less reason to stay in the business, especially a business that ties up so much capital in the first place (in R&D and fabrication costs).

    Examining these factors, especially the last one, it's not too hard to see why so many companies have exited the HDD business recently.
    • I agree with you completely but I do believe that the first point should be clarified

      Within the past few years the difference between PC owners, and Server owners HDD demands has widened. However many hard drive companies try to sell the same hard drives for file servers to normal users.

      Servers are a very profitable market, as demand is always there for bigger and better hard drives, but the big customers have been trimming down and buying less, basically leaving more sellers then buyers.

      Some HDD companies need to be more like Intel with there products. They need a small 5gb hard drive that is CHEEP for PC buyers (like celeron). But they also need 100gb SCSI hard drives for big business (like p4).

      The companies that strike a balance will gain better market share, and more profits, putting them as a leader in the field, without massive R&D costs.

      Medevo
    • We're soon approaching critical mass. The point at which everyone who wants a computer has one. Sales will drop off sharply as only those who require the top of the line buy new computers and those who don't require top of the line buy those discarded machines second hand.
    • 1. Current HDD capacities far exceed most users current demands.

      So all we need is another generation of Windows, which will increase disk usage. For example every run of application will save on disk detailed log (something like strace) to help find problems when something will halt operating system. This will be extremely useful today, inside "War With Terrorism". Don't let your computer be infected - buy new opearating system with extended logging features. Buy it now, or your computer will be destroyed or will help terrorists. You have been warned.
    • OK, so you have more than one drive in your PC, but how many of the billion PCs sold have more than one? Servers do but they make up a very small (albeit highly profitable) segment of the HDD market. Most are installed in desktop PCs and, nowadays, most people don't use more than a fraction of the 20GB+ drives that come with a modern PC. Heck, even 5GB, the kind of capacity that was typical on an entry-level desktop three years ago is more than most users get through.

      Let's add to MP3 fiends: gamers, 3D CAD users (I have assemblies that are 5 GB by themselves), animators, musicians, software developers, videographers, etc. These people need high--end computers.

      Everyone else uses them as glorified typewriters and Internet terminals. These people can get by on 500 MHz processors, 128 MB of RAM, and 5-7 GB hard drives.

      Unfortunately 'everyone else' is the majority of people. What is needed here is a killer app for this new hardware. Something that REQUIRES all of this newfound processor speed, hard drive capacity and RAM capacity. The Internet has been the killer app.

      The Internet, as we all know, doesn't require gobs and gobs of speed. Not yet. Not while dialup lines are the primary way people connect to the Internet. Not until broadband is available everywhere for cheap will the Internet be a viable killer app for new hardware.

      Digital photography and video were supposed to be a killer app. But these are a niche market segments, and compression has gotten better and better.....for some people this is a killer app, for others, its not.

      The problem is that there is no one universal killer app anymore. Advances in hardware technology are increasingly moving toward being utilized differently by different market niches. And computer manufacturers didn't imagine that the ILECs would try to derail broadband access like they have...because otherwise, this would be THE universal killer app...but it's not, and it's not likely to be anytime in the near future.

      We need to abandon this whole concept of Internet as killer app I think for now...if we want technology to progress, it has to have something to rally around. In the late 70s, early 80s it was the spreadsheet. In the late 80s/early 90s it was the GUI and desktop publishing. In the mid-to-late 90s it was the Internet. Now its....?

      Right you can't name it without saying "high speed Internet." But that's not a reality... and until that is, I daresay Moore's law will slow to a crawl.

    • "3. HDDs are now commodities."

      As are operating systems and word processors, but you haven't seen the price of those become marginalized (yet)...

  • i'm constantly afraid that computer makers will go the way of american automobile. designs that are purposfully faulty so they fail and you have to buy them again in 3 years. A 3 year old computer is still a pretty damn fast computer in the office environment, this has dramatically decreased the need for companies to by new computers (a p3? send that one over to tech support). although, with dell now offering a 4(!) year warranty, hopefully quality will continue to prevail.

  • Cyclical (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Em Emalb ( 452530 ) <ememalb AT gmail DOT com> on Monday July 01, 2002 @10:55PM (#3805212) Homepage Journal
    It's just a cycle, like everything else. Hard-drives pretty much outstripped (for most people) the amount of stuff they actually store. Another thing rarely mentioned is that most people are content with what they have, not because they wouldn't like a larger hard-drive, but because it is unnecessary, and things deemed unnecessary are often the first to go when money gets tight.

    On the other hand, I know of one insurance company that puts all claims and paperwork in digital form in about 4 different places. This enables them to move the paper work off site and also requires them to get the largest, most top of the line hdd's they can find. Every month or so, they are bringing a new system online with bigger, better, faster.TM So, failing harddrive companies, concentrate on the businesses, not Mom and Dad with their 12GB they wont fill up, until software bloat causes them to.

  • HD's are on their way out (Score:5, Interesting)

    by kwerle ( 39371 ) <kurt@CircleW.org> on Monday July 01, 2002 @11:04PM (#3805265) Homepage Journal
    I think that IBM's exit is about more than the marketplace being competative. I think it's about the marketplace being dead. Think about it: how much did you spend on your first 256M HD? How much does a 256M USB NVRAM "drive" cost today?

    My bet is that IBM is dumping this business because it's going the way of the tape drive. Yeah, still useful for LARGE amounts of data, but it looks like it should be easy to build NVRAM drives for damn cheap, and that have a MTBF that's longer than most of us will live.

    How much would it cost to build a 20G NVRAM drive that performs 10x better than a platter?
    • IBM is one of the primary development interests in MRAM technologies so your idea might have some credibility to it. It also seems like IBM's reseach is netting results that are a bit more fruitful than other groups researching MRAM. They've partnered with Infineon to bring MRAM stuff to market. We might end up seeing IBM MagStar NVRAM drives in the next couple years with decent data density.
    • How much does a 256M USB NVRAM "drive" cost today?

      The main reason hard disc drives are still around and will be around for a while is because they're cheap. A 128MB USB "drive" from Sony that uses solid-state storage costs about $100... that is about 78 cents/MB. A low-end (7200rpm) 80GB desktop drive costs about $140, that is less than 0.2 cents/MB! Even 15K RPM SCSI drives cost only about 1.2 cents/MB. There are many emerging technologies that will let hard drives grow larger and faster and cheaper.
    • Current NVRAM, based on flash memory, has a limited amount of write cycles before the part fails. Therefore, it does not currently make a viable replacement for magnetic drives in which there are frequent stores and erases.

  • Uses for this much storage (Score:5, Insightful)

    by peterdaly ( 123554 ) <{petedaly} {at} {ix.netcom.com}> on Monday July 01, 2002 @11:13PM (#3805310)
    I agree that storage size has vastly outpaced demand. We have a 2 terabyte chunk of platters attached to a server which will probably triple in the next year or so, but that is not the norm.

    Our "large" database servers (10's of millions of records) have more storage than they know what to with. We are currently big on 18.X gig drives at 15k rpm just beacuse we want the spindles to speed up performance. I'd rather have a 12 or 14 drive cage full of fast 18 giger ebay specials than 73 or even 36 gig drives and have a rockin price/performance ratio.

    I find myself formatting drives for application servers feeling guilty that I am making partitions so big I know will never be more than a quarter full. We have web servers with less than 4 gig of space used serving about a million hits a month. Why do would we be keeping the demand up for the large drives? This drives the demand, and therefore the price and margin of the high end drives down.

    The drive sizes are just growing so fast most users don't need to upgrade. It is not helped by the fact that the upgrade cycle for PC's has slowed down so much. We are replacing PC's at customers sites because the contract says it is time to replace, even though the PC is already more than powerful enough for the job they perform. How many business users really need more than a 450Mhz box on their desk? We are putting 2ghz machines on these desks now. These people run terminal emulation software, browse the web, and type.

    There are many factors contributing to this hard drive problem the article talks about, these are just some personal examples I have of the reason give for the slump.

    -Pete

  • Can some one explain for me. (Score:5, Informative)

    by q-soe ( 466472 ) on Monday July 01, 2002 @11:29PM (#3805372) Homepage
    How this :

    " which has become the last surviving independent manufacturer of disk-drive platters based in the United States."

    Works with this :

    " Like many of Silicon Valley's other high-technology companies, Komag has moved all of its manufacturing operations to Asia and cut its cost structure in half in the last two years. There may finally be a payoff: several analysts said the company's turnaround would soon become more visible with the addition of a prominent new customer."

    This indicates they don't do any manufacturing in the US? Thus are they a US manufacturer or a US owned Manufacturer ? and does this indicate there are non independant manufacturers in the US - for example IBM with US plants ? The word 'independant' is too important to be edited out of the slashdot story as it spins it in a new direction - there may be other manufacturers in the USA (i have no idea where to find out) but Komag is ONE of the last few independant ones (and i think US owned might be more valid).

    This is more interesting :

    " The company is left with two modern factories in Malaysia. It is controlled by two New York-based hedge funds, JDS Capital and Cerberus Partners, which specialize in acquiring debt in distressed companies. They currently hold 57.6 percent of the company's shares."

    So what manufacturing do they do in the US ? I suspect they have one single disk media plant and the platters are sold to OEM's for use in their drives. (they do - see Komags Website [komag.com] - they supply Seagate, maxtor and WD.

    But in fact they don't seem to have a manufacturing plant in the us according to them - from their website [komag.com]

    "Komag maintains two R&D centers in the San Francisco Bay Area and manufactures our disks in Malaysia. "

    That indicates the plant that the NY Times is talking about is one of their R&D plants and not a production plant. Which it is as Komag lists San Jose and Santa Rosa as their 2 R&D plants - and for my mind R&D isn't manufacture...

    So in fact are they a US manufacturer or a US owned manufacturer ? There is a difference to my mind as IBM are a US owned manufacturer.... In fact the article looks like a piece aimed at building the company's stock ahead of their relisting on the share market and not a piece about technology per se.

    • Thanks for the details. You should write to the NYT Editor and let him know what a bogus article it is. They might even publish it in the op-ed section.
      • Really why bother

        The author is John Markoff - as in the man who pushed the line 'Kevin Mitnick is the worlds most dangerous man'and thus was reponsible for him being treated worse than many murderers - as if accuracy in his stories or trifles like the truth are going to to bother him or his employer..

  • Are hard disks really commodities? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by slaker ( 53818 ) on Tuesday July 02, 2002 @12:36AM (#3805579)
    I suppose I disagree on the very basic point that a hard disk is a commodity purchase. RAM is a commodity. I can buy a stick from any of the major manufacturers and know that I'm getting more or less the same level of quality.

    Every hard disk on the market right now has some kind of distinguishing characteristic. Folks doing equipment purchasing may not be *aware* of the distinctions, but they are present nonetheless.

    Want a high-performance 5400rpm ATA disk? Look at Western Digital's *AB-series drives. Quiet SCSI? Fujitsu has/had that market cornered. Performance at any cost? Seagate's X15-36LP.

    I can't say any similar thing about true commodity items like RAM or floppy disk drives. --

    Visit StorageForum [storageforum.net]

    • Actually you can't say the same about floppy drives either. Teac now makes the only good ones, tho back in the 5.25" day, Fujitsu made good FDDs too (I still have several in use with a mfg date of *1986*).

      Conversely Mitsumi floppy drives are crap (made cheap, often out of spec and sometimes DOA brand new, and have a limited lifespan). Generics are worse, and if you tear them apart you'll usually find they are Mitsumi 2nds on the inside.

      OTOH, you're mostly right about RAM -- in general any brand my dealer hands me will work just fine (and a lot of the generics have name-brand chips). Tho in a mission-critical situation I might still opt for genuine Micron or the like, under the theory that even if the chips are the same, perhaps the rest of the stick's electronics are not.

  • "pixie dust" (Score:4, Funny)

    by kesuki ( 321456 ) on Tuesday July 02, 2002 @01:14AM (#3805691) Journal
    As stated in the article, IBM had recently started to use "Pixie dust" to push the supermagnetic barrier to squeeze more data on each platter. So obviously, they ran afowl of the Pixie's union, and had to sell the business to hitachi, which relies on the gremlin's union to keep the pixies in-line.

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday July 02, 2002 @08:14AM (#3806532)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Solution: live backups. Put another machine on your LAN, with the same size drive. Set up a script to run that periodically copies the contents of your primary machine to the backup machine. If your primary machine's drive fails, you haven't lost anything.

      Another solution: RAID-1, two drives mirroring one another. If one dies, the other one is still usable.

      Of course, these don't provide the multiple-generation archiving you get with traditional backups. Still, it's a way of preventing data loss. (Now there's another solution...use multiple removable hard drives for multi-generation backup. Three big hard drives plus removable-disk trays will probably still cost less than one tape drive, and be more convenient besides.)

      • Disk mirroring DOES NOT save your arse when some nitwit MCSE lets a virus infect the server and all the data files. It will whack the mirrors too. If they'd been using the multi-generation tape backups like every _real_ backup plan has, we'd have been back and running in a couple of days, but as it was a lot of stuff simply had to be done over.

        Now (a couple of years later), they do the multi-generation tapes religiously. And periodically they yell at everyone to pare their on-line files down so they can continue to backup 100G hard drives to a 40G tape! (In other words, we are limiting drive space _used_, not to what is available or affordable, but to what the backup system can handle. I do that by moving rarely used files to CD-R.)

        I'm quite OK with using removable disk drives for a multiple-generation backup, as long as you actually have multiple copies, and some of them are off-site. I'm not sure how the costs compare, but this scheme ought to take care of the insufficient capacity and insufficient time excuses. And one of the worst problems with tape backups is ensuring that after a real disaster - like the computer with the tape drive burning up - you'll still be able to read the tapes. I assume that those removable disks could hook up for read-back to any SCSI equipped computer with a suitable cable?
        • I was thinking of those removable IDE drive adapters that have a tray that you bolt the drive into and a housing that fits in the computer's drive bay. If your backup drives were all fitted into those kind of trays, changing them in and out would be a breeze. In a pinch, you could unbolt the drive from its tray and connect it to a computer in the usual way. No doubt similar widgets exist for SCSI drives, should you be using those instead.

          Another alternative might involve those external drives that use IEEE 1394 (FireWire, i.LINK) interfaces. Just plug and copy...and plug them into any 1394-equipped computer for recovery. At that point, you might be going beyond the price of a tape drive...but not by much, and the 1394 drives offer easy random access to files in case you need to recover individual ones.

  • In this article [pcworld.com] I read:

    Seagate will drop the capacity of a 60GB platter to 40GB through a technical process it calls destroking.

    If margins are so tight, I can't figure out how destroking could be happening. I associate intentional crippling of products with monopolies.

  • HD size linked to broadband speeds? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 02, 2002 @04:10PM (#3809938)
    Is it just me, or does it seem there's a direct correlation between your download speeds and your hard drive size?

    Unless you create huge files (digital movies) there's only so many places a person can get data to fill their hard drive. Since most DVDs are not data, the only other medium is CDs, and 650megs barely makes a dent in even a small 10gig hard drive.

    So the only other source for data is the internet. If you have a 56k modem, it would take a long time to download enough to fill even 1 gig. However, with broadband, it's full in a fraction of the time. Anyone with broadband at home would agree: they downloaded a lot more once they had broadband. Whether it's mp3s, movies, games or p0rn.

    Before I had broadband I had a 20 gig hard drive and couldn't even fill half of it. After broadband I bought another 20 gig, then sold them for two 40gigs. Now I'm selling those for a 120 and 100gig. All because of broadband.

    If I were hard drive manufactures I'd be damn sure to market to the broadband market, either form partnerships or sell directly to customers. Because without broadband no one needs anything larger than 10gigs.

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