Hard Drives A-Plenty
Arik Hesseldahl, 05.24.04, 10:00 AM ET
forbes.com
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Today chipmaker Agere Systems (nyse: AGR.A - news - people ) announced new technology for chips that go inside hard drives. The new chips are aimed at helping hard drive manufacturers meet new demand for putting media files of all types--music, video, and whatever else you can think of--on an increasingly wide array of consumer electronics.
What Agere is hoping is that very soon, high-end mobile phones will start containing small hard drives that can stream video and music files and store scores of digital photos.
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"Every teenager is going to have a hard-drive-based portable music player," he says. But mobile phones with hard drives, he thinks, are a bit further out.
One place he expects to see a lot of new hard drives cropping up? The automotive market. "What I'm hearing is that most major automotive manufacturers plan to include hard-disk-based integrated GPS and entertainment systems in every single car and small truck priced above $20,000."
But getting the wireless phone industry to adopt hard drives is a bit more complicated, he says. For major wireless manufacturers like Nokia (nyse: NOK - news - people ), Motorola (nyse: MOT - news - people ) and Samsung, it's all going to come down to the cost of the drive.
"In order for hard drives to take hold in cell phones, the drive has to cost less than $30. Now I think we may see a few high-end cell phones with drives, and that may mean a market of a few million units a year. But getting under that $30 price may be largest challenge the storage industry faces and it may not be solved by 2008. But if the price does come down under $30, we're talking about a market of 150 million to 200 million units."
And with numbers like that, we start to see that Black's hopes for a "near doubling" of the hard drive market don't seem implausible. For comparison, last year hard drive manufacturers shipped approximately 263 million units, according to Gartner figures. Interestingly, a little more than 9% of those drives went into devices other than computers, up from about 6% in 2002. This year, more than 13% of all hard drives will go into devices other than PCs, and Monroe thinks that figure might approach 25% by 2008.
Right now if you want to store pictures or music files on a mobile phone, it's done with flash memory chips, which are currently in such high demand that manufacturers can't seem to make enough of them. Flash chips, Monroe says, are very good--to a point. They're fast at reading data, but slow to save it. And flash also gets expensive at capacities of one gigabyte and higher--prohibitively so for most consumer electronics manufacturers--let alone at four gigabytes, the capacity of Apple's iPod Mini.
Agere's plan is to help drive manufacturers build specialized drives for specific product segments rather than treat their customers with a one-size-fits all approach. For consumer electronics devices, it has developed components that consume power more slowly, which saves battery life. It has also combined several functions onto a single chip to save space. Both can and will make a difference in how consumer electronics will be designed in the near future. What it means is that you're going to have a lot more hard drives in your life very soon. |
