May 18, 2009 – I just got the most recent disk drive shipment projections from IDC, and I was surprised – not only at the rapid ascendancy of SAS but also the rapid demise of Fibre Channel drives.
For example, if IDC’s projections hold up, SAS will account for a full 50% of all enterprise-level drive shipments this year. The rapid growth of SAS comes at the expense of Fibre Channel, which is expected to account for only 19% of drive shipments this year. Enterprise-class SATA drives are expected to make up the remaining 31%, according to John Rydning, IDC’s research director, hard disk drives (HDDs).
And by 2012, IDC estimates that Fibre Channel will have a mere 1% market share, compared to 25% for SATA and 74% for SAS.
“Fibre Channel will continue in small volume after this year, mainly for existing systems that will continue to sell in 2010 and for aftermarket support of current installations,” says Rydning.
He expects next-generation (6Gbps) SAS to further spur adoption of SAS drives (6Gbps arrays are expected near the end of this year), as well as “capacity optimized” drives with native SAS interfaces.
Personally, I don’t think Fibre Channel drives will bite the dust quite so rapidly, but I don’t have access to the raw shipment figures that Rydning does, and he’s been pretty accurate at predicting these things in the past.
I was just surprised at the SAS projections because I still think of SAS as the new kid on the block.
Showing posts with label hard disk drives. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hard disk drives. Show all posts
Monday, May 18, 2009
Friday, February 27, 2009
Fujitsu to bail from HDD biz
February 27, 2009 -- The hard disk drive (HDD) manufacturer ranks will be winnowed down by one with Fujitsu’s announcement that it will sell its HDD business to Toshiba. The deal is expected to close in June, and financial terms were not released. (At first, Toshiba will own 80% of the joint venture and Fujitsu will own 20%, but it will eventually be owned 100% by Toshiba.)
It’s only fitting that the contraction and consolidation in the storage industry has filtered down to the disk drive level. Who would want to be in this business, anyway? Razor thin margins, constant price gouging, competition from solid state disk (SSD) drives, and the need to double capacity and support new interfaces every 18 months, etc.
Toshiba has a tough integration challenge (remember Seagate’s acquisition of Maxtor?), but it will eventually lead to solidification of its leadership position in small form factor (2.5-inch and smaller) drives, as well as giving the vendor entry into the high-margin enterprise-class drive market. It’ll also boost Toshiba’s SSD prowess via the possible combination of Toshiba’s NAND flash memory technology and Fujitsu’s enterprise HDD technology.
But the real winners here, at least in the short term, will be Seagate, Western Digital and, perhaps to a lesser degree, Hitachi GST. Those players will almost definitely gain immediate market share due to attrition during the integration process. (Seagate experienced about a 50% revenue attrition during its acquisition of Maxtor, according to Robert W. Baird and Co., although that was admittedly a buyout on a much larger scale.)
For those of you who are insane enough to trade stocks in the volatile disk drive industry, take a close look at Seagate and WD.
It’s only fitting that the contraction and consolidation in the storage industry has filtered down to the disk drive level. Who would want to be in this business, anyway? Razor thin margins, constant price gouging, competition from solid state disk (SSD) drives, and the need to double capacity and support new interfaces every 18 months, etc.
Toshiba has a tough integration challenge (remember Seagate’s acquisition of Maxtor?), but it will eventually lead to solidification of its leadership position in small form factor (2.5-inch and smaller) drives, as well as giving the vendor entry into the high-margin enterprise-class drive market. It’ll also boost Toshiba’s SSD prowess via the possible combination of Toshiba’s NAND flash memory technology and Fujitsu’s enterprise HDD technology.
But the real winners here, at least in the short term, will be Seagate, Western Digital and, perhaps to a lesser degree, Hitachi GST. Those players will almost definitely gain immediate market share due to attrition during the integration process. (Seagate experienced about a 50% revenue attrition during its acquisition of Maxtor, according to Robert W. Baird and Co., although that was admittedly a buyout on a much larger scale.)
For those of you who are insane enough to trade stocks in the volatile disk drive industry, take a close look at Seagate and WD.
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