http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2381567,00.asp
I cannot imagine a worse business than the hard disk business. Now that Hitachi has sold itself to Western Digital, we are left with two major playersWDC and Seagateand a few lone wolf specialty makers, such as Toshiba and Fujitsu (owned by Toshiba).
Hitachi had long since bought the IBM disk drive business, which had evolved after IBM bought the Control Data hard disk business. This business has always been a fish eating fish industry with one company gobbling up another. Another example of this was Seagate buying Maxtor, which bought Quantum, which bought Plus and Rahm.
Some of the companies just died off. One of the best examples is when Micropolis decided that its business had no future when drives were 1GB in size. This was during the era when dives had hit 1GB and were moving to 3GB and then 9GB. One of the Micropolis executives told me that people wouldn't trust a whole gigabyte on one spindle. He may have said, "Nobody in their right mind!" The company attempted to promote various RAID lash-ups instead of the single drivethe single point of failure. Thanks for playing.
I consider that to be one of the worst predictions of doom since around 1981/1982 when one of my writers at InfoWorld insisted on doing an article predicting the end of the hard disk by 1990. This was during an era when the 40 MB hard disk was coming to market. This writer is now working in Public Relations.
The drive business is a little crazy and helped fuel the predictive pricing models everyone employs for all things tech. Back in the 1980s, the term "learning curve" was in vogue. It referred specifically to the hard disk business where advances came so swiftly that manufacturers had to price ahead of the curve. This meant lower prices at a faster pace, pre-igniting the market.
I don't know how these guys ever make any money, but they manage to do so if they run at a rate that essentially doubles the capacity every 12 months. I can go to Costco today and buy a 2TB drive for around a $100. I suspect I can get 3TB for the same price by Christmas. Now what was it that the guy from Micropolis once said?
Several brand names, including some of the who's who of the tech industry, have fallen by the wayside. I hate to leave anyone out but let's try and recall a few: Shugart, Prarietech, Maxtor (now Seagate), Control Data, IBM, Hitachi (soon), Micropolis, Conner, Cornice, Apple (yes), Mitsubishi, Miniscribe, Quantum, STC, and Syquest.
The industry is not for the weak of heart. It somehow reminds me of the Star Trek episode where McCoy has to re-attached Spock's brain to his body. McCoy takes a jolt from some brain-boosting device and begins to put the brain back in. He says it's a piece of cake, a child could do it. Then as the brain boost wears off, he beings to panic and cannot see how anyone could do this. It's impossible! This is how the Micropolis people must have felt.
After all, the technology, if we look at it objectively and consider that fact that a 14-inch platter 5MB hard disk was a huge big deal in 1980, is ridiculous. This is not silicon transistors. It's all mechanical, yet it out-paces Moore's law by a lot. The evolution of hard disk technology is the most amazing tech saga in the history of the world if you actually think about what we have witnessed.
It's now boiling down to two major players for a final and glorious finale. Will this all end up with a Petabyte drive on the desktop? I think so. And it will be $99 at Costco.
A walk down memory (pun intended) lane.
I cannot imagine a worse business than the hard disk business. Now that Hitachi has sold itself to Western Digital, we are left with two major playersWDC and Seagateand a few lone wolf specialty makers, such as Toshiba and Fujitsu (owned by Toshiba).
Hitachi had long since bought the IBM disk drive business, which had evolved after IBM bought the Control Data hard disk business. This business has always been a fish eating fish industry with one company gobbling up another. Another example of this was Seagate buying Maxtor, which bought Quantum, which bought Plus and Rahm.
Some of the companies just died off. One of the best examples is when Micropolis decided that its business had no future when drives were 1GB in size. This was during the era when dives had hit 1GB and were moving to 3GB and then 9GB. One of the Micropolis executives told me that people wouldn't trust a whole gigabyte on one spindle. He may have said, "Nobody in their right mind!" The company attempted to promote various RAID lash-ups instead of the single drivethe single point of failure. Thanks for playing.
I consider that to be one of the worst predictions of doom since around 1981/1982 when one of my writers at InfoWorld insisted on doing an article predicting the end of the hard disk by 1990. This was during an era when the 40 MB hard disk was coming to market. This writer is now working in Public Relations.
The drive business is a little crazy and helped fuel the predictive pricing models everyone employs for all things tech. Back in the 1980s, the term "learning curve" was in vogue. It referred specifically to the hard disk business where advances came so swiftly that manufacturers had to price ahead of the curve. This meant lower prices at a faster pace, pre-igniting the market.
I don't know how these guys ever make any money, but they manage to do so if they run at a rate that essentially doubles the capacity every 12 months. I can go to Costco today and buy a 2TB drive for around a $100. I suspect I can get 3TB for the same price by Christmas. Now what was it that the guy from Micropolis once said?
Several brand names, including some of the who's who of the tech industry, have fallen by the wayside. I hate to leave anyone out but let's try and recall a few: Shugart, Prarietech, Maxtor (now Seagate), Control Data, IBM, Hitachi (soon), Micropolis, Conner, Cornice, Apple (yes), Mitsubishi, Miniscribe, Quantum, STC, and Syquest.
The industry is not for the weak of heart. It somehow reminds me of the Star Trek episode where McCoy has to re-attached Spock's brain to his body. McCoy takes a jolt from some brain-boosting device and begins to put the brain back in. He says it's a piece of cake, a child could do it. Then as the brain boost wears off, he beings to panic and cannot see how anyone could do this. It's impossible! This is how the Micropolis people must have felt.
After all, the technology, if we look at it objectively and consider that fact that a 14-inch platter 5MB hard disk was a huge big deal in 1980, is ridiculous. This is not silicon transistors. It's all mechanical, yet it out-paces Moore's law by a lot. The evolution of hard disk technology is the most amazing tech saga in the history of the world if you actually think about what we have witnessed.
It's now boiling down to two major players for a final and glorious finale. Will this all end up with a Petabyte drive on the desktop? I think so. And it will be $99 at Costco.
A walk down memory (pun intended) lane.