Asia hard-drive battle pits speed against capacity
ELLA LEE
Seagate and Quantum, the two biggest hard-drive makers in Asia, are placing radically different bets on what consumers want in their high-end desktop PC hard drives. Seagate is emphasising fast access, while Quantum is using larger disks to provide higher capacity, at the slight expense of operation speed.
Seagate's Medalist Pro 3.25-inch hard drives, to be available about the Lunar New Year, rotates at up to 7,200 revolutions per minute (rpm). Meanwhile, Quantum's new 5.25-inch Bigfoot TX series can store up to 12 gigabytes (Gb). The former claims to be the fastest, while the latter claims to have the highest capacity in the desktop hard-drive market.
Seagate and Quantum, together with Western Digital (WD), are the three largest hard-drive makers in the world. But WD focuses mainly on North American and European markets, with less presence in Asia, which accounts for about 15 per cent of revenue.
Hard-drive leader Seagate has a full range of hard drives for servers, workstations, desktop PCs and notebooks.
Quantum has concentrated on making hard drives for desktop PCs, which account for 60 per cent of its revenue. But it is moving to sell hard drives used in high-end servers and workstations, where Seagate has the edge.
Quantum believes the demand for huge-capacity hard drives is being led by today's multimedia boom, which includes high-resolution 3D images, full-motion video and Dolby surround sound, as well as the increasing use of "push" technology on the World-Wide Web, which downloads Web pages and stores them on users' hard drives in advance, for faster reading.
Users on average would double their storage requirements every year, Quantum's Asia-Pacific marketing director David Rawcliffe said. Quantum already has stopped producing 2 Gb hard drives. Mr Rawcliffe said most of the company's output was 8 Gb models, and that 10 Gb models would become the standard in two to three years.
Quantum introduced the Bigfoot hard drives - CY series - two months ago, and derives 25 per cent of its current desktop hard-drive revenue from the 5.25-inch products.
Seagate agrees hard drives will get larger, but in terms of capacity, rather than physical size. Y S Chia, country manager in China, said Seagate planned to raise the capacity per platter to 2.25 Gb from 2.1 Gb for 3.5-inch disks, instead of adopting large 5.25-inch disks.
Seagate reported revenues of US$1.89 billion for its first financial quarter to September, below Salomon Brothers' expectation of $2 billion. The quarter loss was $240 million, reflecting a gross margin of 15.6 per cent, substantially lower than analysts' forecast of 20 per cent.
Seagate blamed price wars and weak demand for high-end products. The company derives more than half of its revenues from hard drives used in servers and workstations.
Quantum shared the same view with its rival. It said continuous pricing pressure and turmoil in the high-end market had a "negative impact" on profitability, though it reported revenue growth of 38 per cent, amounting to $1.55 billion, for its second quarter ended September 28. Net income was $104 million.
In the desktop segment, Seagate, Quantum and WD had about the same global market share of 23 to 24 per cent, each shipping about six million desktop hard drives in the third quarter of this year.
Fujitsu and Maxtor are relatively small players, each moving about 2.5 million units, with 9 per cent of the desktop market in the same period.
Maxtor also is introducing its new DiamondMax hard drive. Its fastest model boasts a seek time of 9.7 milliseconds. The seek time measures how long it takes for the hard drive head to first locate a block of data. The 8.4 Gb DiamondMax 2160 costs $500, or $59.52 per Gb.
The Seagate Medalist costs $495 for a 8.6 Gb model, or $57.56 per Gb. Its seek time is 10.5 milliseconds. The Quantum Bigfoot TX is priced at $400 for 12 Gb, or $33.33 per Gb. It has the slowest seek time at 12 milliseconds.
Quantum's Bigfoot TX hard drives, available in 4/6/8/12 Gb, are scheduled for volume production this month. They will be employed by original equipment manufacturer (OEM) partners such as Compaq, Hewlett-Packard and IBM.
The Bigfoot TX targets entry-level business systems and home PCs. Mr Rawcliffe said business users had high-speed as well as high-capacity demand for random-access applications such as spreadsheet and transaction processing. Home users required more sequential applications such as for playing video, which need more capacity than speed.
The drawback of the 5.25-inch Bigfoot TX is its lower operation speed because it takes longer for the motor to rotate the large disk. Its rotation speed is 4,000 rpm, much slower than 5,400 rpm of most 3.5-inch models.
Seagate's Medalist Pro series 3.5-inch hard drives have rotation speed of 7,200 rpm. The Medalist Pro 9140 and 6530, with capacities of 9.1 Gb and 6.5 Gb, will be available next year. |
